2067. Improving Outpatient Antimicrobial Prescribing for Respiratory Tract Infections

BACKGROUND: Antimicrobial stewardship often focuses on inpatients, yet inappropriate antimicrobial use is common in the outpatient setting. We performed a prospective, stepped wedge interventional study to assess the impact of an educational and feedback-based intervention on prescribing practices for respiratory tract infections (RTIs) in the adult primary care ambulatory setting. METHODS: Family and internal medicine practices were randomly placed into 6 cohorts, which received the intervention in a stepped wedge fashion at monthly intervals. The study period was July 1, 2016 to October 31, 2018, with the intervention occurring from October 1, 2017 to October 31, 2018. The intervention consisted of a 20-minute in-person educational session on appropriate antimicrobial prescribing for RTIs followed by monthly feedback to individual providers on their proportion of antibiotic prescriptions in comparison to their peers for (1) visits with a primary diagnosis of any RTI and (2) visits with a primary diagnosis of an RTI for which an antibiotic should rarely be prescribed (tier 3 diagnoses). The outcome of interest was whether an antibiotic was prescribed in RTI visits. Chi squared testing and logistic regression were used for analysis. RESULTS: Thirty-two practices participated, with 197,814 unique visits with a primary RTI diagnosis. Of these, 141,888 (71.7%) were physician visits and 55,926 (28.3%) were advanced practitioner visits (Figure 1). The proportion of visits with antibiotic prescriptions dropped from 37.2% to 24.0% following the intervention (P < 0.0001). Antibiotic prescriptions were significantly reduced for all primary RTI visits, OR 0.53 (95% CI 0.52 to 0.54), as well as for visits with tier 3 RTI diagnoses, OR 0.64 (95% CI 0.60 to 0.68). The proportion of visits with antibiotic prescriptions also exhibited a marked seasonal variation, another finding of the study (Figure 2). CONCLUSION: An educational intervention with provider feedback successfully reduced antibiotic prescribing for RTIs in the ambulatory setting. Additional study is necessary to assess the sustainability of response over time after discontinuation of the monthly feedback. [Image: see text] [Image: see text] DISCLOSURES: All authors: No reported disclosures.