Reducing Overuse of Antibiotics at Discharge Home

Overview

The goal of this two-arm parallel cluster-randomized trial of 40 hospitals is to test the effectiveness of the ROAD Home Intervention on days of antibiotic overuse at discharge in patients hospitalized with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) or urinary tract infection (UTI). The main question it aims to answer is: Does an antibiotic stewardship approach that is customized to the needs, goals, and resources of a hospital (i.e., the ROAD Home Intervention) compared to standard stewardship approaches reduce antibiotic overuse at discharge in hospitalized patients with CAP and UTI? The investigators will randomize 20 hospitals in the Michigan Hospital Medicine Safety Consortium (HMS) to the intervention group and 20 HMS hospitals to the "usual care" control group. During the study the investigators will: (a) assess baseline performance, existing stewardship strategies, hospital priorities, and resources; (b) develop a customized discharge stewardship "suite" for each intervention hospital based on the findings of the baseline assessment and informed by the ROAD Home Framework; and (c) support hospitals in selecting strategies and creating an implementation blueprint to be implemented over 12 to 15 months. After the intervention period, the investigators will compare days of antibiotic overuse at discharge and patient outcomes between intervention and "usual care" hospitals. It is hypothesized that hospitals randomized to the ROAD Home Intervention will have fewer days of antibiotic overuse at discharge compared to "stewardship as usual" control hospitals.

The Reducing Overuse of Antibiotics at Discharge (ROAD) Home study is designed to test the hypothesis that hospitals randomized to an implementation intervention that includes external facilitation to support participants while allowing for free choice in selecting and implementing evidence-based antibiotic stewardship strategies based on local context will have fewer days of antibiotic overuse at discharge than "stewardship as usual" control hospitals. The first aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the ROAD Home Intervention on days of antibiotic overuse at discharge for hospitalized patients treated for CAP and UTI. The second aim of this study is to identify contextual factors influencing the implementation of the ROAD Home Intervention and to assess implementation outcomes (acceptability, feasibility, fidelity, and sustainment) to inform future broad dissemination. A two-arm, parallel, cluster-randomized trial will assess the effect of the ROAD Home Intervention on days of antibiotic overuse at discharge. Forty hospitals will be recruited from the Michigan Hospital Medicine Safety Consortium (HMS; https://mi-hms.org/), a statewide 69-hospital collaborative consisting of diverse hospitals and focused on improving the care of hospitalized patients. HMS hospitals that agree to participate will undergo covariate-constrained randomization to improve balancing of critical hospital characteristics between groups with 1:1 allocation to the ROAD Home intervention vs. a "stewardship as usual" control. In the 12- to 15-month intervention period, hospitals will implement the intervention while investigators assess days of antibiotic overuse at discharge and patient outcomes. During the intervention period and in the 9-month post-intervention period, investigators will conduct a theory-informed mixed-methods process evaluation to evaluate barriers, facilitators, and implementation outcomes across hospitals.