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Facility is a step ahead on pneumonia care

Respiratory Care Weekly, September 13, 2006

Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center's pneumonia treatment guidelines are more effective than national guidelines in treating and wiping out pneumonia, reports the September Chest. The key is to identify which bacteria is causing the condition, doctors at Wake Forest said. The authors estimate that national treatment guidelines will match the correct antibiotic for the bacteria 70% of the time, while their tweaks to the guidelines hit it 90% of the time. The facility used hospital data on infection-causing bacteria to develop institution-specific guidelines for the treatment of pneumonia.

"The choice of which antibiotics to start is very important," said James Beardsley, Pharm.D., lead author. "They need to cover the germs that are causing the pneumonia in that particular patient. If you're not right from the start, people are at higher risk of dying."

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