2026 Critical Care Congress Skip to main content
2026 Critical Care Congress Main banner
Final Program


Advance Program
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
Session Icons
Thought Leader Session
Thought Leader Session
Guidelines Session
Guidelines Session
Aging Adult Track
Aging Adult Track
Additional Registration Fee
Additional Registration Fee

Research Snapshot Theater: Infectious Disease, Adult I

Evaluation of a Broad-Spectrum Antibiotic Monitoring Tool Across a Large Academic Hospital System

Sunday, March 22, 2026
9:45 AM - 10:45 AM Central Time
Location: Connections Central - RST 05
Introduction: Broad-spectrum antibiotic (BSA) use within the Yale New Haven Health System (YNHHS) is evaluated daily as part of the pharmacist workflow. The electronic medical record alerts pharmacists based on BSA use greater than 48 hours and expiring/expired BSA orders. Pharmacists are expected to document according to these alerts using a template designed to monitor therapy appropriateness and encourage stewardship interventions. The objective of this research is to assess compliance with documentation expectations to identify stewardship challenges and improvement opportunities.


Methods: This was a quality improvement study with same-day, concurrent medical chart review across five YNHHS delivery networks. This study included patients admitted between October 1, 2024 and November 15, 2024, who received BSA (ceftriaxone, ceftazidime, cefepime, or piperacillin-tazobactam) for more than 48 hours or had expiring antibiotic orders requiring pharmacist review. The total and documented alerts per day were assessed three times per week. Ten patient charts were reviewed weekly on two separate days. Data obtained included patient demographics, current antibiotics, indication, day of therapy, culture results, pharmacist assessment, intervention, and follow-up. The primary outcome of this study was template compliance with BSA documentation by critical care pharmacists. Secondary outcomes included overall documentation compliance and stewardship interventions. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data.


Results: Fifty patient charts were reviewed. Compliance with the prespecified note template was 30%. The overall documentation compliance was 96%. Documenting pharmacists facilitated eleven interventions (22%) to discontinue antibiotics and seven interventions (14%) to deescalate antibiotics. Antibiotics were continued in 32 patients (64%), as they were deemed appropriate or additional information was required.


Conclusions: Despite high rates of BSA documentation and stewardship interventions, compliance with the template was low. While the template was designed to promote antimicrobial stewardship interventions, its underutilization highlights the need for optimization. Collaboration with critical care pharmacists to amend the template may increase compliance and therefore number of interventions.