Clinician Education on Antibiotic Use Lasts; Behavioral Interventions, Not So Much

Misuse of antibiotics is dangerous for both individual patients and the collective human microbiome. In a 2016 study, researchers randomized 47 U.S. primary care practices to physician education about antibiotic prescribing guidelines plus one or more of three behavioral interventions or to education alone (i.e., controls). Two of the behavioral interventions lowered inappropriate antibiotic prescribing rates for acute respiratory infection (ARI) significantly more than education alone: (1) electronic medical record (EMR)−based prompts asking clinicians to enter free-text justifications for prescribing antibiotics, and (2) monthly emails to clinicians in which their antibiotic prescribing performances were compared with those of their peers…