Patients Often Get Antibiotics Without a Doctor Visit, Study Finds

Health experts recommend doctors examine patients, seek testing to verify antibiotics are necessary

Patients widely received antibiotics with no record of seeing a doctor, a nationwide study found, despite recommendations that doctors physically screen patients to prevent unnecessary prescriptions that could contribute to superbugs.

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Northwestern University looked through a decade of medical bills for 53 million people nationwide. They found nearly 83 million antibiotic prescriptions that were filled with no record of an associated doctor visit that could have verified that the antibiotics were necessary. That totaled about 28% of the 300 million antibiotics prescribed to patients, who were enrolled in Medicaid between 2004 and 2013…

The Wall Street Journal

Patients Often Get Antibiotics Without a Doctor Visit, Study Finds

Melanie Evans

February 3, 2020

Health experts recommend doctors examine patients, seek testing to verify antibiotics are necessary

More

Wall Street Journal

The World Needs New Antibiotics. The Problem Is, No One Can Make Them Profitably.

Pharmaceutical Technology

Fighting AMR with a value and subscription model

Fierce Biotech

Scientists use AI to find new antibiotics, but can they climb out of the ‘valley of death’ to the clinic?

PHARMAVOICE

‘The Last of Us’ might be fiction, but fungi are a looming threat

Sign up for the latest on fighting AMR