Medical Center Develops Mobile App to Address Antimicrobial Resistance

The University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) in Omaha has released a mobile app aimed at fighting against antimicrobial resistance.

Antimicrobial resistance is resistance of a microorganism to an antimicrobial drug that was originally effective for treatment of infections caused by it, according to the World Health Organization.

The app, created by the Infectious Diseases Division in the Department of Internal Medicine, puts the university's clinical guidelines, protocols and dosing adjustments for antimicrobial use into a clinician's hands, university officials say. The department worked with Agile MD, a platform for creating, organizing, and distributing clinical knowledge.

"The app is aimed at any treating clinician—physicians, nurse practitioners, PAs—and it's designed to take what's on our website and put it on a handheld device in an easy-to-use format," Trevor VanSchooneveld, M.D., assistant professor of infectious diseases and medical director of The Nebraska Medical Center's Antimicrobial Stewardship Program, said in a news release. "Rather than having to go on the internet and find a website, which is not optimized for device viewing, this optimizes it for the smaller devices. It also allows clinicians to view the data offline,” he said.

Besides being able to pull up information right at a patient's bedside, the app allows for easier updating, especially compared to a traditional pocket manual, officials say. “With this app, when we update what's on the Internet, we can just push that out on the app at the same time," said VanSchooneveld.

Part of the goal of the department, he said, is to put tools in the hands of clinicians to help them better use antimicrobials, in such a way as to decrease antimicrobial resistance and improve patient outcomes.

Read the source article at University of Nebraska Medical Center