| Empowering Patients, One Poster at a Time |
| Eisenhower Health is helping patients become “antibiotic aware” by teaching them about appropriate antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance. Using CDC materials like “Can I Feel Better Without Antibiotics?” (PDF) and “What’s Got You Sick?,” (PDF) Eisenhower Health displays customized posters in exam rooms and waiting areas across three urgent care centers. Patients with acute respiratory infections receive after-visit summaries explaining why antibiotics are not prescribed. Publicly posted commitment letters and branded CDC materials (e.g., badge reels and pens) reinforce the message. These efforts encourage provider-patient conversations and help reshape expectations around antibiotic use.
|
Pathway to Better Prescribing
|
| Rady Children’s Hospital collaborated with their quality team, surgery division, and emergency medicine department to revamp their appendicitis care pathway. Their updated protocol emphasizes optimal antimicrobial prescribing in the emergency department for patients with acute appendicitis. To support implementation, the team delivered targeted education to emergency medicine providers and updated their appendicitis electronic health record order sets. The team observed strong adherence to the new guidelines, demonstrating the power of cross-disciplinary collaboration in advancing antimicrobial stewardship.
|
Steps Toward Stewardship
|
| San Mateo Medical Center implemented a limb salvage program for diabetic foot infections based on Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) guidelines. By reducing unnecessary broad-spectrum antibiotic use and promoting appropriate treatment durations, San Mateo is promoting antibiotic stewardship and improving patient outcomes. Specifically, the program emphasizes multidisciplinary collaboration, using surgical cultures to target diagnosis and therapy, optimizing empiric therapy and de-escalating therapy as appropriate, adhering to evidence-based treatment guidelines, and tracking clinical outcomes.
|
Microlearning, Mega Stewardship
|
| Stanford Health Care successfully implemented a microlearning curriculum “ABX Pearls,” to improve antimicrobial stewardship among a diverse, multidisciplinary group of clinicians. Delivered via weekly emails and accessible on the antimicrobial stewardship website and Sanford Guide mobile app, the program provides concise, high-yield information on optimizing antibiotic use and reducing resistance. The curriculum’s excellent engagement metrics — 89% of clinicians read the emails more than half the time — and clinician uptake — 81% of clinicians use the education in practice — attest to the program's success and its role in fostering a positive culture shift towards better stewardship.
|
CAP-tivating Stewardship Success
|
| | Sutter Medical Center Sacramento implemented a multi-phase quality improvement project to optimize antibiotic use in hospitalized children with uncomplicated community-acquired pneumonia (CAP). Through provider and pharmacist education, decision-support tools, and provider feedback, the initiative significantly improved adherence to guideline-concordant empiric therapy (from 34.7% to 62.8%), discharge therapy (from 55.1% to 93.0%), and short-course treatment (from 51.0% to 76.7%), all without increasing readmission rates. This collaborative effort strengthened interdisciplinary stewardship and helped shift prescribing culture toward antibiotic-aware, evidence-based pediatric care.
|
High FIVE for Shorter Duration!
|
| The Sutter Antimicrobial Stewardship Committee (sAMS) launched the Sutter High Five project to reduce unnecessary antibiotic exposure by promoting 5–7-day treatment durations for common, uncomplicated infections in urgent care and walk-in clinic settings. sAMS targeted five key conditions — cellulitis, cystitis, community-acquired pneumonia, acute otitis media (ages 2 to 6), and acute bacterial sinusitis. The initiative used 2024 baseline data to highlight antibiotic overuse, such as noting that over 50% of prescriptions for acute otitis media and sinusitis were 10 days. To intervene, sAMS developed a dashboard to track quarterly prescribing patterns and distributed a tip-sheet flyer and evidence table to providers. With strong support from infectious disease specialists and collaboration across urgent care, quality, and pharmacy teams, sAMS created a workgroup to guide project education, rollout, and ongoing evaluation.
|
Allergy? Maybe Not!
|
| The Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System launched a pharmacist-driven initiative in the emergency department to improve evaluation of penicillin allergy labels. Created through a strong multidisciplinary collaboration, this successful protocol increases and improves formal assessments of reported allergies by tailoring patient follow-up plans depending on whether a patient is admitted or discharged. By identifying and removing inaccurate penicillin allergy labels, the initiative promotes improved patient outcomes, reduces healthcare costs, and reduces broad-spectrum antibiotic prescribing.
|