The management of febrile infants under the age of 3 months has long been a controversial topic, and historically these patients have been required to admitted for IV antibiotics (for at least 48 hours) until all cultures come back negative.
The implementation of multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) panels has changed practice, providing quicker “rule-outs” of life-threatening infections and allowing patients to be spared of unnecessary nights in the hospital & antibiotics.
In this project, we reviewed 118 admissions of infants younger than 90 days old for sepsis rule outs. We compared the length of stay (LOS) and duration of antibiotic therapy (DOT) for patients admitted before and after respiratory & CSF PCR panels became available at our institution.
Hunter Ratliff, MD, MPH
Internal medicine resident
My research interests include epidemiology, social determinants of health, and reproducible research.
Posts
PCR project: Round 2
Modeling Preliminary PCR data
Pedi PCR Prelim Analysis
Publications
Assessment of the impact of multiplex PCR panels in sepsis evaluations of young febrile infants
