Outpatient Antibiotic Stewardship: Can It Work?

Antibiotic stewardship programs improve antibiotic administration practices and decrease antibiotic resistance rates in hospitalized patients. Successful programs utilize guidelines for antibiotic use and provide direct feedback to prescribing physicians. Antibiotic stewardship has focused on inpatient prescribing, but most antibiotic prescribing occurs in outpatients. To examine the effect of a pediatric outpatient stewardship intervention on antibiotic prescribing for acute respiratory tract infections (sinusitis, streptococcal pharyngitis, pneumonia, and viral infections), investigators randomized 18 pediatric practices (162 physicians) in a large primary care network to an educational session followed by regular audit and feedback or no…