CDC’s FY 2015 budget request for $11.1 billion includes funds for $455 million to rapidly identify new infectious disease threats. A portion of the funds would support the proposed “Detect and Protect Against Antibiotic Resistance” (AR) initiative to improve surveillance and laboratory capacity at local, state, and national levels to deal with domestic AR pathogens.
The funds requested would enable CDC to further reduce healthcare-associated infections, modernize health microbiology and bioinformatics capabilities, invest in the new proposed antibiotic resistance and detection response initiative and to modernize public health microbiology and bioinformatics capabilities.
CDC Director Tom Frieden MD spoke at a CDC telebriefing on the CDC report “Are Prescribing Practices Putting Hospital Patients at Risk?” The report points out that critical public health issues facing the country include antibiotic resistance and untreatable infections. Dr. Frieden said, “Last fall, CDC released an antibiotic resistance threat report that outlined key actions needed to take to fight resistance.”
The report emphasizes the need to track resistance patterns and examine prescribing practices in today’s hospitals. This means examining the entire decision-making process related to choosing and giving patients antibiotics, when to start patients on them, what antibiotics to use, the dosage needed, and the length of time a patient should take the antibiotic.
CDC is working to provide tools such as a new checklist to help hospitals and other healthcare facilities improve antibiotic prescribing practices. In addition, CDC is emphasizing the need for hospital leadership to provide information technology to monitor hospital resistance patterns. The CDC’s national healthcare surveillance network has a module capable of assisting hospitals to track both antibiotic resistance patterns and antibiotic prescribing patterns.
According to Dr. Frieden, coordinated communications and working on prevention is critical if the problem is to be solved. It is important for facilities to join together to share resistance pattern information, look at all the data, and then use a standardized approach to solve health issues resulting from AR.
Also, CDC would be able to partner with the hospital associations, healthcare providers, with CMS, and others to reduce the rate of C. difficile infection by half in order to prevent at least 20,000 deaths, 150,000 hospitalizations, and over $1 billion in healthcare costs.