Antibiogram created to address antibiotic resistance

    The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment has completed Colorado’s first statewide antibiogram, a tool that tracks resistance to antibiotics. The antibiogram will help health care facilities track antibiotic resistance and put systems in place to counteract it. It also may help providers across the state select the best antibiotics to use in specific cases.
    The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls antibiotic resistance “one of the most urgent threats to the public’s health.” For years, antibiotics have been overused and even used for illnesses they can’t treat, such as viral infections. As a result, some bacteria are developing ways to resist treatment. This means some illnesses that once were easy to treat with antibiotics are becoming untreatable, leading to dangerous infections that can cause serious disability or even death.
    Dr. Christopher Czaja, an infectious disease physician with the state health department, said the antibiogram was created with the support of the Colorado Hospital Association, Colorado Health Care Association, a health care quality improvement organization called Telligen and local experts. Hospitals and other health care facilities throughout the state contributed the 2016 data used to create the statewide antibiogram. Although compiling the data was complicated because facilities track their data in varying ways, the large volume of reported data helped boost reliability.

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