Penn Medicine and Teqqa LLC a software and analytics company are collaborating on ways to track antibiotics prescribed in clinical settings. They will work together to develop a new software platform and mobile app to encourage appropriate antibiotic use by providing real-time data to clinicians. This will also help minimize the risk of dangerous pathogens capable of developing resistance to life-saving antibiotics.
The resistance of bacteria to commonly used antibiotics has been increasing at an alarming rate as resistance patterns vary internationally, nationally, regionally, and locally. These differences matter since a drug that is effective against a life threatening bacterial infection at one hospital may be much less effective at another hospital.
“The appropriate use of antibiotics to treat infections depends on knowing what antibiotics kill which bacteria,” said Keith Hamilton, MD, Associate Director for Healthcare Epidemiology, Infection Prevention, and Control, and Director of Antimicrobial Stewardship at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
He added,” Predicting and understanding the trends and patterns of resistance allows clinicians to choose appropriate medications to treat infections and provides the health system real actionable data to make broad recommendations for use of these life-saving drugs.”
The goal is to understand resistance patterns particularly within a given hospital to determine the best methods to track, prevent, and treat these infections. What is needed is a clear, real-time, and accurate understanding of drug sensitivity and resistance patterns within individual hospitals and the community. This is needed since physicians typically choose antibiotics empirically that potentially contributes to resistance and poor patient outcomes.
As part of the collaboration, Penn Medicine and Teqqa will jointly develop the software needed to allow for real-time microbiology data analysis as well as a mobile app to give the prescribing physician immediate access to this critical information to be able to choose the best antibiotics for patients. This will replace the current practice of providing data to clinicians every 9 to 12 months, since the data is nearly obsolete as soon as it is made available.