Ways to Engage Physicians in Improving Antimicrobial Prescribing

The imperative to prescribe antibiotics more appropriately often leads to substantial conflict between designers of programs to change prescribing behavior and clinicians whose behavior needs to change. In this Dutch study, researchers engaged physicians from seven clinical departments in two hospitals to design interventions that would improve their own prescribing behavior. Study departments were selected based on poor performance on both rate and appropriateness of antibiotic prescribing.

The investigators performed detailed root-cause analyses of prescribing behavior and outcomes, including both quantitative and qualitative data gathering, and presented their results to the targeted physicians. Each department then chose at least two pos…