About our project
Antibiotic guidelines are important to ensure that patients get appropriate treatment and to reduce the spread of resistance. But, there are currently lots of problems with guidelines, specifically, non-standardization.
Our electronic software will solve this problem by converting current guidelines into a common format, allowing different hospitals and doctors, all over the world, to access guidelines quickly and efficiently.
More patients will get the right antibiotics, and doctors will be able to spend less time searching for medications, and more time caring for their patients.
The Problem & Solution
Imagine looking for a specific recipe in an old cook book that has no index! It’s time consuming. And newer cookbooks keep coming out, so familiarizing yourself with one edition is almost pointless.
Doctors face such problems. Antibiotic guidelines aren’t well designed and many are not electronic. Many countries don’t even have guidelines for their doctors which means prescriptions are made without reference and patients may be put at greater risk.
Our solution is our electronic platform for editing and viewing antibiotic guidelines that can be used anywhere in the world.
Both, website and applications for Android and iOS will enable hospitals and practices to enter their guidelines into our database to be automatically converted into a display that can be accessed by doctors on their phones, tablets or computers. Hospitals/practices will remain responsible for ensuring their content is up to date.
How Antibiotic Helper Works:
1. Hospitals upload their guidelines through our website
2. We convert the guidelines into a standardized format
3. Doctors are able to access their hospital’s guidelines through our website, their smartphones and tablets.
4. Patients get the right antibiotics.
How We’ve Made Guidelines Smarter:
1. Fast access – Available through smartphones, or on the web, and fully searchable. Answers in seconds, not minutes.
2. Safer for patients – Alerting doctors to important interactions with other medications, and calculators to help select the right dose.
3. Consistency – The same view no matter where you are, so when doctors work in a different hospital they don’t need to learn again where and how to look things up.
4. Always up to date – Hospitals can instantly update their guidelines, meaning old paper copies are not accidentally used inappropriately.
5. Cheaper to produce – No need for every hospital to come up with new designs and printing.
6. Better for the environment – Less need to print thousands of copies every time changes are made.
7. Educational – An interactive guideline that facilitates learning for students in a way that a hundred page paper document cannot!
AB is Patient Centered:
Antibiotic Helper is about making sure patients get the best possible antibiotic treatment. It makes the guidelines which doctors use to prescribe antibiotics more accessible, and so will help patients get the right antibiotic earlier, meaning they get the best treatment for their infection, spend less time in hospital, and have lower hospital costs.
How We Help Doctors:
Our project will help doctors select the right antibiotic for their patients as quickly and easily as possible. Ensuring that the right antibiotic is chosen will reduce mortality and length of stay for their patients, and show safe prescribing.
How We Help Hospitals, Institutions, and/ or Medical Facilities:
Antibiotic Helper will ensure that more antibiotic prescriptions are appropriate, and follow your hospital’s antibiotic guidelines. This has been shown to improve treatment success rates, reduce mortality and hospital stay, and reduce antibiotic costs considerably.
Why This is So Important:
The launch of our Antibiotic Helper project coincides with the “Get Smart About Antibiotics Week” in the US and European Antibiotic Awareness Day (November 18th).
November 18th is European Antibiotic Awareness Day. Each year 25,000 deaths occur due to resistant bacteria in Europe already, and in the US the cost to the healthcare system is $20 billion annually. In most other countries we don’t yet know the burden, but it is likely to be considerably higher. We hope that wider access to smarter guidelines will help reduce the spread of resistant bacteria, and also ensure that everyone can access the right antibiotic at the right time.
Clinical Proof to date
Guidelines help patients receive the best possible therapy. For antibiotics, this means that patients are more likely to survive serious infectious illnesses and to get the right treatment earlier for more minor infections.
Using guidelines to select appropriate antibiotics is often cheaper too, as it involves less use of expensive broader spectrum antibiotics and results in shorter hospital stays for patients. On a more global level, it is vital for us to use antibiotics as appropriately as possible to reduce the development of antibiotic resistance.
How We Will Spend Your Contributions:
1. Finalizing platform development including testing on devices
2. Pilot testing in hospitals
3. Generating awareness of the platform, particularly in low income countries
4. Generating useful data about the implementation of Antibiotic Helper and how doctors are using it
About Country Level Rewards
The greatest benefits of Antibiotic Helper will be seen when multiple hospitals in a country are able to use it. A small number of our rewards will bring Antibiotic Helper to many/all hospitals in a country of your choice for a year.
To ensure sustainability, we will work closely with all the involved stakeholders to enable access over the coming year. We will start with the small number of hospitals participating in our pilot and expand from there.
Since we aren’t imposing any limits, this can be a highly cost effective method of bringing consistent antibiotic guidelines to hospitals to countries all over the world. Please contact us at help@antibiotichelper.com if you are interested in a country level reward.
FAQs
Where will it be available?
Everywhere, and on all mobile platforms, is our plan. A hospital or practice asks to be included on the platform, they submit their guidelines, and they’re converted into a standardised format. Individual doctors download an application or access their local guidelines through our website.
Is this a non-profit project?
Yes. A fee will be charged to hospitals for implementation, and where possible some money will go towards subsidising access in low income countries. Doctors will never have to pay for access, it’s their guidelines!
Has this been done before?
A few applications exist, but have been developed for specific hospitals, and we have found them to cost upwards of $6,000 per institution per year.
Can I contribute in a non-financial way?
Yes! We’re looking for translators and doctors keen to get guidelines from their hospital onto our platform. Please email us at help@antibiotichelper.com.
Could this be useful for research?
Absolutely – gathering guidelines in a comparable format will allow researchers to learn more about how antibiotics are used across the world. We plan to make this data freely available.
What are the challenges we face?
Our initial project is to create a platform that is suitable for the majority of hospitals/practices that would want to use Antibiotic Helper. In later projects we hope to strengthen the framework by making it more adaptable to different settings, giving more control over content to those responsible for its implementation.
We are very hopeful that our project will be helpful in low and middle income countries, but many places still do not have access to the technology required for this; a longer term aim is to engage with other mobile health developers to ‘package’ useful software together as cheap smartphones become increasingly available.
Who We Are:
Oliver Dyar is a doctor from Devon, UK. He graduated from Oxford University, and has a master’s in global health from Karolinska Institute, Sweden. He has studied antibiotic resistance in Vietnam, and has just completed the first European survey of medical student perspectives on antibiotic prescribing and resistance.
Talk to Us:
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverjdyar
Twitter: twitter.com/abhelper
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Have a question?
If the info above does not help, you can ask the project creator directly.
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