1350 - Optimizing Blood Culture Use in Critically Ill Children: Year One of a Multi-Center Diagnostic Stewardship Collaborative

Background: Overuse of blood cultures can lead to false positives and unnecessary antibiotics. Our objective was to describe the implementation and 12-month impact of a multi-site quality improvement collaborative to reduce unnecessary blood cultures in pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) patients.

Methods: In 2018, 14 PICUs joined the Blood Culture Improvement Guidelines and Diagnostic Stewardship for Antibiotic Reduction in Critically Ill Children (Bright STAR) Collaborative, designed to understand and improve blood culture practices in PICUs. Guided by a multidisciplinary study team, sites 1) reviewed existing evidence for safe blood culture reduction, 2) assessed local practices and barriers to change, and 3) developed and implemented new blood culture practices informed by local context.  We facilitated and monitored project progress through phone calls, site visits, and collaborative-wide teleconferences. We collected monthly blood culture rates and monitored for delays in culture collection as a safety balancing metric. We compared 24 months of baseline data to post-implementation data (2-14 months) using a Poisson regression model accounting for the site-specific patient days and correlation of culture use within a site over time.

Results: Across 14 sites, there were 41,986 pre-implementation blood cultures collected over 238,182 PICU patient days.  The mean pre-implementation site-specific blood culture rate was 19.42 cultures/100 patient days (range 9.59 to 48.18 cultures/100 patient days). Post-implementation, there were 12,909 blood cultures collected over 118,600 PICU patient days. The mean post-implementation rate was 14.02 cultures/100 patient days (range 5.40 to 37.57 cultures/100 patient days), a 23% decrease (relative rate 0.77, 95% CI: 0.60, 0.99, p = 0.04). In 12 months post-implementation, sites reviewed 463 positive blood cultures, and identified only one suspected delay in culture collection possibly attributable to the site’s culture reduction program.Bright STAR Collaborative Site Blood Culture Rate 100 Patient Days


Conclusion: Multidisciplinary teams facilitated a 23% average reduction in blood culture use in 14 PICUs. Future work will determine the impact of blood culture diagnostic stewardship on antibiotic use and other important patient safety outcomes.