JUNE 2003
Volume 27 • No. 6

New feature of Skolar provides information
on antibiotic effectiveness

With a few quick keystrokes and mouse clicks on a computer or PDA, medical staff members can now find out which antibiotics are most effective against the strains of bacteria found at Stanford Hospital & Clinics. The information was recently added as a Stanford-specific feature to Skolar, the medical search engine developed at Stanford that gives clinicians easy access to information from a broad range of authoritative sources.

All Stanford medical school faculty, including the adjunct clinical faculty, have free access to Skolar through the Lane Library Web site, http://lane.stanford.edu/index.html, or the Skolar Web site, www.skolar.com.

To use the new feature, physicians can simply enter the name of the desired bacteria as their search term and then go to the "special content" section of Skolar for the Stanford antibiotic guidelines. Stanford users can then view charts that list the isolates most commonly found at SHC and the antibiotics available to treat each one. The degree of susceptibility for each antibiotic is indicated by a percentage of up to 100 percent. The chart also provides general cost information for each medication, with a rating of one, two or three dollar signs.

Jose G. Montoya, assistant professor of medicine and co-chair of SHC's antibiotics committee, said this new feature of Skolar can significantly improve patient outcomes by enabling physicians to immediately identify and prescribe the antibiotic most likely to be effective against a given bacteria, even before the lab has isolated and performed susceptibilities on the particular strain of that bacteria.

"This is a major step in helping our physicians prescribe the most effective antimicrobial agent right away," said Montoya, who suggested and helped develop the new feature along with collaborators in the microbiology laboratory, pharmacy and Lane Library. The impact on patient care is significant, he said, because "research has clearly shown that choosing the best antibiotic up-front, not two or three days later, lowers mortality rates."

To develop the antibiotic susceptibility feature, staff at the microbiology laboratory analyzed the past year's worth of data on which bacterial strains were present in the hospital and which antibiotics were most, and least, effective against them. The data will be gathered and incorporated into Skolar periodically.

Montoya noted that quickly obtaining such comprehensive information on antibiotic effectiveness would be difficult, if not impossible, without a Web-based tool like Skolar. "Our lab has had this information for years on paper, but to get useful information from it, you'd have to spend hours flipping through pages and pages and that isn't feasible anymore," he said.

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