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Abstract

The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA) recommend that health care organizations invest in data systems capable of measuring quality improvement from antimicrobial stewardship implementation. Successful antimicrobial stewardship programs (ASPs) have been shown to improve patient outcomes and decrease antimicrobial usage by up to 35%, with an annual savings to institutions of up to $900,000. Health care providers and the government are looking to informatics and technology to play an important role in managing costs, as well as improving health care quality and patient outcomes. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) are embracing informatics by providing financial incentives to qualified institutions as they adopt, implement, upgrade, or show ?meaningful use? of certified electronic health record (EHR) technology to improve patient care by meeting several predefined objectives established by the CMS.6 By 2014, the federal government wants more than half of all health care institutions to use EHRs. Facilities that have not implemented EHRs by 2015 will be penalized. EHRs represent 1 role that technology plays in health care. Applications (apps) geared toward mobile computing devices (eg smartphones and tablets) have also made an increasing impact in health care. As these technologies become more widespread, they are increasingly being applied to efforts to improve antibiotic use. Therefore, the objective of this article is to describe the impact of informatics and technology, focusing on EHRs and clinical decision support systems (CDSSs), apps, electronic resources, and social media, on antimicrobial stewardship.

Biography

Ravina Kullar pursued her Pharm.D. at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She then completed a first year clinical residency at Detroit Receiving Hospital. After her residency, Dr. Kullar completed a two and a half year pharmacotherapy outcomes fellowship at Wayne State University, where she also received her Masters in Public Health (M.P.H.) degree in Statistics and Epidemiology. After finishing, Dr. Kullar moved to Portland, OR to serve as an Infectious Diseases faculty member to the medical and pharmacy students at OHSU while serving as the Infectious Disease Transplant pharmacist. Dr. Kullar left OHSU about a year ago to join Cubist Pharmaceuticals, where she is the Los Angeles Clinical Scientific Director. She has provided talks both internationally and nationally on infectious diseases topics and her research, and comes highly published on topics ranging from appropriate treatment of serious hospital infections to the optimization of antimicrobial stewardship.