Understanding and Informing Early Hospital Antibiotic Prescribing for Potential Infection

The goals of this study are to (1) examine temporal trends in early hospital antibiotic prescribing patterns over the past 5 years, to assess for unintended consequences associated with earlier antibiotics in severe sepsis/septic shock; (2) quantify the patient-level harm associated with receipt of unnecessary antibiotics; and (3) identify subsets of patients, discernable in real-time with high certainty, who benefit from immediate antibiotics, versus the subsets of patients for whom it is safe to delay antibiotics by 3 hours (thereby allowing time for rapid diagnostics, such as procalcitonin).

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