IDWeek2019 News Network: Urgent Areas of Unmet Need in ABSSSI

Segment Description: Joseph Reilly, BS, PharmD, BCGP, Clinical Pharmacist, Atlanticare Regional Medical Center, discusses the current treatment landscape for ABSSSI and areas of unmet need.

Interview transcript: (modified slightly for readability)

I think there's a number of treatments available that are effective for skin infections and they cover the typical pathogens we would expect to encounter gram-positive cocci, including methicillin-resistant Staph aureus. The major issue that comes to mind is ensuring that a patient will take a full course of therapy because of compliance and transition from the inpatient to the outpatient setting.

[Patient compliance] certainly is an issue to consider for providers. How would we make sure that patients are going to take full course of antibiotics? Because we want them to take their full course. Hospitals certainly don't want the readmissions. And we don't want disease progression. So the skin infection can turn into a bacteremia or an osteo or an endocarditis for that matter. How they can do it, there's not really an option for direct observed care where they're going to watch patients take antibiotics. There are some new therapies out there, long-acting lipoglycopeptides, where a single dose would ensure you know, 10 plus days of IV antibiotics, and that way we can remove the compliance issue from the patients. So that's certainly an option for patients that present with skin infections, and you could prevent admissions with that. And it's also an option for patients that are admitted to a hospital that have a skin infection, and now they're going to be discharged on oral antibiotics.

I mean, our biggest concern in a hospital is when we discharged somebody with a skin infection. We want to make sure that they take their oral antibiotics and the outpatient setting and from what we know looking at our numbers, that doesn't always happen.