Urgent-care antibiotic prescribing: An exploratory analysis to evaluate health inequities

Abstract

Healthcare disparities and inequities exist in a variety of environments and manifest in diagnostic and therapeutic measures. In this commentary, we highlight our experience examining our organization’s urgent care respiratory encounter antibiotic prescribing practices. We identified differences in prescribing based on several individual characteristics including patient age, race, ethnicity, preferred language, and patient and/or clinician gender. Our approach can serve as an electronic health record (EHR)–based methodology for disparity and inequity audits in other systems and for other conditions.

Infection prevention requires attention to patient and caregiver language: Removing language barriers from infection prevention education

“…In a retrospective analysis of a single health system’s urgent-care antibiotic prescribing patterns, nonwhite, Hispanic–Latino, and non-English–speaking patients were less likely to receive a prescription for antibiotics compared with white, non-Hispanic/Latino, English-speaking patients. 41 Additional research is needed to identify the impact of patient language on antibiotic prescribing and counselling. There are many barriers to qualified language interpreter use, including financial.…”

Impact of an antibiotic stewardship initiative on urgent-care respiratory prescribing across patient race, ethnicity, and language

“…Subsequent organizational efforts to identify disparities in care delivery across our system, possibly representing inequitable care, revealed prescribing differences across patient race, ethnicity, and preferred language prior to the intervention. 9 To further understand these differences, we conducted a post hoc analysis of our intervention to assess whether its effect differed by patient race, ethnicity, or preferred language and to determine if disparities in antibiotic prescribing between groups persisted.…”