Senior care software provider PointClickCare has added antibiotic stewardship functionality to its Infection Prevention & Control solution, enabling staff to optimize the use of antibiotic agents via best practice guidelines — and avoid building resistance.
The commercial release of Infection Prevention & Control workflow is designed to help customers manage and control the spread of infection amongst the senior population.
Common infections, such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, gonorrhea and salmonellosis, are becoming harder to treat due to antibiotic resistance. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur in the U.S. each year, and more than 35,000 people die as a result.
PointClickCare’s stewardship functionality provides staff with a predictable and reproducible process that can be integrated into daily workflows to ensure treatments align as optimally as possible with patients’ specific issues. In addition to the potential for building up resistance, if patients are prescribed antibiotics that are too strong, they can suffer from Clostridioides difficile or C. diff, causing symptoms ranging from diarrhea to inflammation of the colon.
“On top of the continued battle senior care facilities are facing against COVID-19, antibiotic resistance is touted as a major risk to global health with unique implications and challenges associated with senior populations,” said Nicki Fetterman, product leader at PointClickCare. “Physicians, nurses, pharmacy consultants, infection preventionists and certified nursing assistants must all communicate and integrate stewardship efforts into their day-to-day workflow in order to ensure that residents receive the right drugs to treat their issues appropriately.”
PointClickCare initially made the IPC tool available to customers at no cost as part of an effort to manage and control the spread of COVID-19 amongst the senior population. In addition to the antibiotic stewardship capabilities, features included in the initial launch will remain, such as access to a repository of infection cases and a real-time dashboard that captures infection case information in accordance with industry standards. Users have reported significant time savings for frontline staffers.
“Our goal with this software is to help facilities eliminate guesswork and empower staff to make the best and safest decisions without needing to default to costly and possibly unnecessary medications, and reducing the risk of traumatic hospital readmissions,” said Russ DePriest, PointClickCare’s senior vice president and general manager of the skilled nursing market.
