How Stewardship Recommendations Can Drive Change in Patient Management

Romney Humphries, PhD, D(ABMM), section chief of Clinical Microbiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, discusses how stewardship recommendations can drive change in how physicians manage their patients.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“We’ve done some work at UCLA looking at novel technologies, but to be honest, a lot of it has been done in the research lab because the business case that needs to be put together to bring these into the clinical lab and justify the cost for testing is pretty big.

We’ve done some work looking at, ironically, genotypic methods for organisms that we don’t grow routinely, including Neisseria gonorrhoeae. Through this, what we’ve really learned is [that] while reporting the results of a rapid test in the electronic medical record, which is what all labs do to report their results, is good, it doesn’t really make much impact on how the physician manages that patient because they already have an idea when they ordered the test [of] how they’re going to be managing that patient.

Follow-up with the physician to let them of know of the results and perhaps [to] let them know of institutional or stewardship recommendations on how to respond to the results is really what’s going to drive change in the management of these patients.”