The role of electronic health record and "add-on" clinical decision support systems to enhance antimicrobial stewardship programs

Increasingly, demands are placed on healthcare systems to meet antimicrobial stewardship standards and reporting requirements. This trend, combined with reduced financial and personnel resources, has created a need to adopt information technology (IT) to help ease these burdens and facilitate action. The incorporation of IT into an antimicrobial stewardship program can help improve stewardship intervention efficiencies and facilitate the tracking and reporting of key metrics, including outcomes. This paper provides a review of the stewardship-related functionality within these IT systems, describes how these platforms can be used to improve antimicrobial use, and identifies how they can support current and potential future antimicrobial stewardship regulatory and accreditation standards. Finally, recommendations to help close the gaps in existing systems are provided and suggestions for future areas of development within these programs are delineated.