CAP TODAY Pathology/Laboratory Medicine/Laboratory Management
Christine Ginocchio, PhD, MT, vice president of global medical affairs for BioMérieux and BioFire Diagnostics, has been appointed to the Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria. As the first voting member from the IVD industry, she will be one of 15 council members who make recommendations to the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Before joining BioMérieux, Dr. Ginocchio was senior medical director and chief, Division of Infectious Disease Diagnostics, North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System Laboratories (now Northwell Health).
“While the development of new antibiotic drugs is vital,” she tells CAP TODAY, “we too often overlook the essential role diagnostics will play, and in fact are playing, to curtail antibiotic misuse.” Here is more of what she told us last month about antibiotic stewardship in hospitals and her advice to hospital administrators regarding the resistance problem. “The urgency is unmistakable,” she said.
February 2017—In a context where the lack of drugs against resistant bacterial pathogens will continue and antimicrobial prescriptions are highly complex, effective antibiotic stewardship programs are strongly needed. In the U.S., the CDC and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services highly recommend, while the Joint Commission requires, that all hospitals and nursing care centers have antimicrobial stewardship programs, effective January 2017.
Dr. Ginocchio
Many U.S. hospitals have implemented mandatory antimicrobial stewardship programs to reduce the misuse and overuse of these drugs, which is the only proven way to mitigate the development and spread of resistant organisms. However, many hospitals still struggle in implementing stewardship programs. It’s vital that government and industry do everything possible to expedite this process so that all U.S. hospitals implement best-practice stewardship.