From paper to practice: Strategies for improving antibiotic stewardship in the pediatric ambulatory setting.

ABSTRACT

Antibiotic stewardship aims to better patient outcomes, reduce antibiotic resistance, and decrease unnecessary health care costs by improving appropriate antibiotic use. More than half of annual antibiotic expenditures for antibiotics in the United States are prescribed in the ambulatory setting. This review provides a summary of evidence based strategies shown to improve antibiotic prescribing in ambulatory care settings including providing education to patients and their families, providing education to clinicians regarding best practices for specific conditions, providing communications training to clinicians, implementing disease-specific treatment algorithms, implementing delayed prescribing for acute otitis media, supplying prescribing feedback to providers with peer comparisons, using commitment letters, and prompting providers to justify antibiotic prescribing for diagnoses for which antibiotics are not typically recommended. These various mechanisms to improve stewardship can be tailored to a specific practice's work flow and culture. Interventions should be used in combination to maximize impact. The intent with this review is to provide an overview of strategies that pediatric providers can take from paper to practice.