Clinical Impact of Pharmacist-Led Antibiotic Prescribing for Urinary Tract Infections (UTI) in the Emergency Department (ED)
- Le, Cassandra;
- Dominguez, Alex;
- Lee, Allison;
- Stevens, Craig;
- Haste, Nina;
- Childers, Richard;
- Castillo, Edward;
- Shammas, Mena;
- Vo, Brandon;
- Le, Jennifer
Abstract
Background: A pharmacist-led culture callback collaborative practice agreement (CPA) was implemented in the emergency department to improve workflow by addressing positive cultures from discharged ED patients and to optimize antibiotic prescribing. We aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of our pharmacist-led program on readmission rates to the ED and hospital.
Methods: Our retrospective cohort study included patients discharged from the ED with a positive urine culture collected from 01/2022 to 12/2022 (pre-CPA implementation) and 02/2023 to 06/2025 (post-CPA implementation). The primary outcome was 30-day, all-cause ED and hospital re-admission.
Results: Data collection and analysis are in progress. A total of 5,594 patients will be included: 1,660 in pre-CPA and 3,934 in post-CPA. The median age of patients is 55 years and 75.4% are female. Preliminary data shows that the post-CPA group has 776 (19.7%) patients who revisited the ED and 334 (8.5%) patients who were readmitted to the hospital within 30 days.
Conclusions: Although the purpose of the CPA was not to reduce hospitalizations, we hope to show that ED and hospital readmission were at least similar in pre-CPA and post-CPA, indicating that the work pharmacists were doing were not harmful to patients.