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Antimicrobial resistance led to higher hospital charges, longer stays
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Patients with antimicrobial-resistant infections saw higher hospital charges, longer hospital stays and an increased death rate compared with patients with antimicrobial-susceptible organisms, new data indicate.
“Antibiotic resistance is costly in terms of money, but also for the patient in terms of morbidity and mortality,” Elaine Larson, RN, PhD, professor of epidemiology at Joseph Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, told Infectious Disease News. “There are many programs and much activity to improve the judicious use of antibiotics and increasing antibiotic stewardship.”
Elaine Larson
The retrospective analysis included 5,699 patients who had a health care-associated or community-associated infection at one of four hospitals in Manhattan from 2006 to 2008. They evaluated hospital charges, lengths of stay and mortality among all patients to compare between antimicrobial-resistant and antimicrobial-susceptible infections. The infections included Staphylococcus aureus, Enterococcus faecium, E. faecalis, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Acinetobacter baumannii.
For health care-associated infections, patients with resistant organisms had more than $15,000 in hospital charges and lengths of stays 1.8 days longer than patients with sensitive organisms. For community-associated infections, patients with resistant organisms had additional charges of almost $31,000 and 3.7 extra days in the hospital. Patients with resistant health care-associated infections also had a higher death rate.
“This study simply confirms what has been thought to be the case — that resistance is to be avoided,” Larson said. “One possible way to reduce risk of resistance is to follow the CDC recommendations for antibiotic use — right drug, right timing, right patient, right dose. Of course, the best option is to prevent infections in the first place with appropriate measures to prevent cross-transmission.”
Larson said that she and her colleagues will be doing additional studies to examine the effect of contact precautions on reducing spread of resistance and to evaluate the effectiveness of adherence to transmission-based isolation precautions for preventing the spread of infections.
Disclosure: Larson reports no relevant financial disclosures.
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