Next Steps for Research on Gram-Negative Skin Infections

Segment Description: Glenn Tillotson, PhD, consultant with GST Micro, discusses possible avenues for future research on gram-negative skin infections and inappropriate empiric therapy.

Interview transcript (modified slightly for readability):

Dr. Tillotson: "What we'd like to do next is to actually see if we can construct a risk or a scoring system that actually identifies those patients who are more at risk of having a gram-negative pathogen. There are risk-scoring systems for predicting MRSA and I think there is the potential to produce an adjunctive score for gram-negatives, so when a clinician looks at a patient they can ask a series of 5 or 6 questions and that will help direct them to a gram-positive, gram-negative, or a mixture. What the next stage would be is to put that scoring program into some of the institutions we've worked with and to see if we can improve the appropriate empiric therapy rate. At present, 13% of the patients in the program have inappropriate therapy. It would be nice to get that below 10%."

Tillotson presented the study, “Pathogen Type and Inappropriate Empiric Therapy (IET) in Culture-positive Skin and Soft Tissue Infection (SSS) Among Hospitalized Patients in the US, 2015-2017,” at MAD-ID 2019, held May 8-11, 2019, in Orlando, Florida.