“Phantom” Antibiotics Are Commonly Prescribed for Medicare Patients

Appropriate antimicrobial stewardship depends on an accurate assessment of the need for antibiotic therapy. Noting that prescriptions are often provided solely on the basis of telephone conversations, researchers studied the records of Medicare recipients who had suffered an acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in 2007 or 2008 to identify those who had received a “phantom” prescription — given without a documented healthcare encounter in the preceding 7 days — for any of the 20 most common antibiotics.

In the year following an AMI, 62% of 185,010 patients received a total of 356,545 antibiotic prescriptions, of which 14.75% were phantom prescriptions and 13.04% were new (non-refill) phantom prescriptions. Patients in the cohort were predominate…