The CDC estimates that 20 to 50 percent of antibiotics prescribed in U.S. acute-care hospitals are unnecessary or inappropriate. With the need for healthcare systems and federal agencies to increase their focus on antibiotic stewardship, both providers and pharmacists play a vital role in monitoring safe and appropriate use. Today, VigiLanz, a clinical surveillance company, and IllumiCare, a leading provider of point-of-care technology, announce a partnership to increase visibility within providers' and pharmacists' normal workflows around antimicrobial therapy monitoring.

IllumiCare's Smart Ribbon® is an EMR-agnostic, non-intrusive ribbon of information that hovers over the EMR and provides patient-specific information such as the costs and risks of medications and tests, opioid exposures, and more. The Smart Ribbon displays VigiLanz's Antimicrobial Stewardship Solution in a more visible, convenient and accessible place in the EMR when the provider or pharmacist is making care decisions. With this ability to respond to context in real-time, the Smart Ribbon only delivers notifications on issues or opportunities that busy clinicians and pharmacists can personally act on. This increases engagement with the VigiLanz insights and saves pharmacists the time and energy often spent tracking down a clinical counterpart to resolve an activation that's halting the workflow.

"One key element to promoting antimicrobial stewardship is making sure the information is easily accessible to the right clinician or pharmacist when they need it most," said GT LaBorde, CEO of IllumiCare. "By making this information not only easier to see and more actionable, but also appropriately tailored to the person taking the action, antimicrobial stewardship efforts will be more successful."

Houston Methodist Sugar Land Hospital is the first health system to deploy the VigiLanz clinical surveillance alerts within IllumiCare's Smart Ribbon. Pharmacists can choose to engage with VigiLanz activations by viewing them, marking them as necessary and providing comments, all within their current workflow in the EMR. One of the most important activations is the visibility of drug-bug mismatches, in which the antimicrobial a patient receives is not adequate for the microbiological organism presumed to be causing the clinical infection. Additionally, the VigiLanz alerts highlight broad antimicrobial use, de-escalation opportunities, and conversion opportunities to move the patient to an antibiotic that has equal efficacy but is less expensive, such as from IV drugs to oral medications.

"Having actionable insights into antimicrobial use is critical; being able to put those insights in front of clinicians and pharmacists at the point of care is industry-leading," said David Goldsteen, MD, CEO of VigiLanz. "We're thrilled to be partnering with IllumiCare to deliver our trusted clinical surveillance insights through their Smart Ribbon to those who take action, ensuring safe and appropriate antimicrobial use."

For more information, visit IllumiCare at www.illumicare.com and VigiLanz at www.vigilanzcorp.com.