Establishing Antibiotic Stewardship Programs in Rural Hospitals to Decrease Fluoroquinolone Prescribing: The Vermont Experience
- Resource Type
- article
- Authors
- Lindsay M. Smith; John W. Ahern
- Source
- Infection Prevention in Practice, Vol 3, Iss 1, Pp 100121- (2021)
- Subject
- Antimicrobial stewardship
Rural hospitals
Fluoroquinolones
Infectious and parasitic diseases
RC109-216
Public aspects of medicine
RA1-1270
- Language
- English
- ISSN
- 2590-0889
Summary: Critical access and rural community hospitals struggle to develop effective antimicrobial stewardship programs (ASPs). We assisted six Vermont hospitals in developing their antimicrobial stewardship programs to meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's core elements of antibiotic stewardship. We show that rural hospitals in Vermont can (1) extract antimicrobial use data from their electronic medical record; (2) develop interventions to decrease high use antimicrobial agents, such as fluoroquinolones; and (3) successfully develop sustained ASPs meeting the CDC core elements in less than 2 years.