Cardinal Health, a $91 billion health care services company that improves the cost-effectiveness of health care, has introduced a powerful new tool that gives pharmacists the ability to rapidly analyse antibiotic use trends and identify significant opportunities to improve antibiotic stewardship efforts.

Almost 2 million people each year are sickened by antibiotic-resistant infections, resulting in 23,000 deaths annually. And up to 50 per cent of antibiotic use in hospitals is inappropriate.

Cardinal Health's new Antibiotic Analytics dashboard helps pharmacists address these trends. It is part of Cardinal Health's Drug Cost Opportunity Analytics software package, a web-based technology that provides data and insights to help hospital pharmacy leaders manage drug spend. The new dashboard tracks and benchmarks antibiotic selection and use over time, by Defined Daily Dose or Days of Therapy. It then evaluates susceptibility and resistance patterns, and determines the best pharmaceutical agent for each hospital's specific patient population.

The new Antibiotic Analytics dashboard supports hospitals' and health systems' current Antibiotic Stewardship programmes, and:

Allows users to toggle back and forth between DRG and prescribing physician information from antibiotic trending data;Identifies IV-to-PO comparisons to benchmark;Provides health system-level reporting;Integrates antibiograms with antibiotic use trending; and serves as the foundation of antibiotic stewardship programmes.

"From Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initiatives to White House executive orders, antibiotic resistance is a growing concern for hospitals and health systems, nationwide, making antibiotic stewardship top-of-mind for many pharmacy leaders," said Tom Burke, general manager of Cardinal Health's Innovative Delivery Solutions business. "This new tool provides pharmacists with the actionable insight they need to develop proactive antibiotic stewardship programmes, measure and continually improve them all in an effort to improve patient safety and reduce unnecessary healthcare costs."