Thursday, June 24, 2010

We're good enough, we're smart enough, and doggone it, people like us!

Today's daily affirmation for infectious diseases doctors comes to us from Dave Warren's group at Washington University and is published in this month's American Journal of Medicine. In this study, the authors evaluated 341 cases of Staph. aureus bacteremia and compared outcomes between those patients who had an infectious diseases consult and those who didn't. Not at all surprising to any of us was that in multivariable analysis, patients who had ID consults had a 56% reduction in 28-day all-cause mortality, even though by most metrics the patients who had the consults were sicker. So when you start your rounds tomorrow consider yourself an independent predictor of good outcomes!
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2 comments:

  1. Dan DiekemaJune 24, 2010 at 9:41 PM

    Thanks for posting on this, Mike.
    Similar findings in this recently published study from Germany:

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19654021

    This begs a question: how far should we go to "encourage" ID consults in every case of S. aureus bacteremia? Should it be automatic? Should we add a text comment to the micro lab report, suggesting an ID consult and citing this literature?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mike EdmondJune 25, 2010 at 8:58 AM

    Would we go to jail for self-referral?

    ReplyDelete

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