February 3, 2025Northern Health’s Antimicrobial Stewardship (AMS) Program ‘Guidance’ is undergoing a major upgrade in 2025.
This program has been used at Northern Health since 2011 and is an essential decision support tool used to promote safe and appropriate antimicrobial use across the organisation.
Guidance is a web-based antimicrobial decision support program designed by the National Centre for Antimicrobial Stewardship (NCAS) to support AMS activities in hospitals. First developed in 2005, the program has been implemented in over 60 hospitals nationally and has been associated with reductions in broad-spectrum antimicrobial use, gram negative resistance rates and antimicrobial costs.
The upgraded program will offer improved functionality and is fully customisable, with a number of key benefits:
Advanced clinical decision support and improved prescriber workflows
Enhanced functionality of the Guidance program will allow more effective clinical guidance and decision support for clinicians when prescribing antimicrobials and treating infectious conditions. The upgraded program will allow clinicians to search by indication or medicine and provide treatment recommendations based on fully customisable treatment pathways, based on local and national guidelines.
Workflow efficiency and EMR integration
The upgraded program is designed to be significantly easier to use, supporting improved clinician and AMS team workflow through a variety of pathways:
- Integration with EMR with a dynamic link to Guidance at the time of prescribing
- Streamlined upload of antimicrobial active orders data
- Improved flexibility of content design and management, using the Guideline Writer platform
- Expansion of the program to include all Northern Health sites, improving offsite AMS activities and surveillance
- Increased data-base of decision support algorithms, including over 260 indications. Each of these are able to be easily customised to reflect local guidelines
Improved AMS auditing and reporting capability
The upgrade facilitates more efficient auditing and reporting processes within the AMS clinical team, through improved patient triage and ward round capabilities, more comprehensive documentation of patient assessments and recommendations, and improved functionality of the reporting portal. In addition, the program has been redesigned to enable real-time business intelligence reports, tailored to meet the AMS and Sepsis Clinical Care Standards. These reports can be tailored to provide real-time, actionable data to specific units and/clinical areas, which included key areas of quality improvement and targeted interventions.
The Guidance build will begin in February, with roll-out planned for the second half of 2025. Updates will be provided throughout the build process and user education scheduled closer to the implementation
This program is used by all clinical staff at Northern Health, so will improve antimicrobial prescribing across the organisation. In particular, we’re excited that this upgrade will allow us to extend the AMS program to the Kilmore site for the first time. The build is being directed by an expert working group consisting of the AMS team, Pharmacy, IT and Informatics.
“My hope is that the improved functionality and EMR integration will allow increased utilisation of local prescribing Guidelines and lead to safer antimicrobial use at Northern Health,” said Danni Miatke, Antimicrobial Stewardship Lead Pharmacist.
Featured image: David Nguyen, Deputy Director Pharmacy – Quality and Informatics, Amina Nouri, AMS Pharmacist, Danni Miatke, AMS Lead Pharmacist and Saliya Hewagama, AMS Lead Physician.
