Medscape: How ERs are Cutting Antibiotic Days for Children

By Lisa Gillespie

A quality improvement project nearly quintupled the rate of children receiving evidence-based, shorter courses of antibiotics for pneumonia and sinus infections, cutting unnecessary drug exposure without increasing treatment failures, according to the researchers.

Research increasingly shows shorter courses of antibiotics — 3-5 days for community-acquired pneumonia and 5-7 days for acute bacterial rhinosinusitis — are safe in children. But clinical adoption has lagged, leaving kids exposed to 10-day regimens that elevate risks for antibiotic resistance, adverse drug side effects, and unnecessary costs.

The new study, published in Pediatrics, demonstrates that combining EHR modifications and peer comparison data with frontline clinician champions can establish shorter antibiotic durations as standard care.

“There’s a lot of evidence for adults that 5-7 days is fine — the only reason pediatrics is not included in that is because there were not enough studies on kids. But the physiology of sinusitis is not different between a kid and an adult,” said Rana El Feghaly, MD, MSCI, director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Mercy Kansas City in Kansas City, Missouri, who helped lead the research.

Read the full article via Medscape