A regional antibiogram, combined profiles of antimicrobial susceptibility, may provide community hospitals with useful information about low-prevalence pathogens, according to a study published in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology.
Researchers combined antibiogram data from participating hospitals for 13 clinically relevant gram-negative pathogen-antibiotic combinations. They developed a regional antibiogram based on the mean susceptibilities of the combined data.
Across all pathogen-antibiotic combinations, 69 percent of local susceptibility rates fell within one standard deviation of the regional mean susceptibility rate, and 97 percent of local susceptibilities fell within two standard deviations of the regional mean susceptibility rate.
All hospitals' local susceptibility rates were within two standard deviations of the regional mean susceptibility rate for low-prevalence pathogens.