Approach to Antibiotic Stewardship in a Community Based Urgent Care Setting

Antibiotic stewardship is of national importance in all medical settings but especially important in the on-demand market (emergency rooms, urgent care and retail medical clinics). Many studies have documented that antibiotics in these medical settings have been and are continuously over-utilized. In an effort to understand and correct this in our organization, we reviewed the prescribing patterns for all of our medical providers, in over 320,000 patient visits, over a variety of seasons and implemented measures to reduce inappropriate prescribing. This report describes interventions of our “Smarter Use of Antibiotics” campaign for non-strep pharyngeal infections, “bronchitis” and upper respiratory infections including suspected sinusitis. We will also describe our results, including a reduction in antibiotic prescribing among all providers and a 60% drop in prescribing among those who prescribed most often.