Antibiotics Without a Visit, or Even Without an Infection?

Despite decades of evidence that American outpatients receive too many antibiotics, U.S. doctors continue to prescribe lavishly. A new analysis of a composite commercial insurance database details some surprising patterns among these prescriptions.

During a 27-month period in 2016 to 2018, 22 million antibiotic prescriptions were provided to 8.6 million patients (85% adults). Prescribers most often were physicians in a primary adult or pediatric care practice. Fewer than half of all prescriptions were associated with both an in-person visit and an infection-related diagnosis (47%); the rest lacked either documentation of a visit (31%) or documentation of an infection (22%). Both these “deficient” prescription patterns were more common for ad…