PointClickCare antibiogram software for nursing homes that need the F881 facility antibiogram the infection control module does not build

Where the antibiogram gap sits in F881

CMS requires every certified nursing home to run an antibiotic stewardship program under 42 CFR 483.80(a)(3), surveyed as F881. The program has two halves. One is antibiotic use: protocols, timeouts, tracking starts and days of therapy. The other is resistance: knowing which organisms in your building still respond to which drugs. CDC's Core Elements for nursing homes name the facility antibiogram as the tool for the second half, and surveyors can ask whether prescribers have one and use it for empiric choices.

PointClickCare's public material covers the first half well. None of its product pages, solution sheets or releases that we could find describe building a cumulative antibiogram by organism and drug. That is the gap. Most buildings fill it with an old hospital antibiogram, a spreadsheet the consultant pharmacist rebuilds once a year, or nothing at all.

• Covered in PointClickCare IPC: infection case log, McGeer and Loeb screening, antibiotic timeouts, case dashboards, outbreak trends
• Not described by PointClickCare: percent susceptible by organism and drug, first isolate per resident, the 30 isolate rule, pooled years
• Covered by Antimicrobe: the facility antibiogram, urine first, with counts and the rules printed on the report

Why the culture data is easier to get from your lab than from PointClickCare

PointClickCare receives lab results through its Integrated Lab Results feature and through lab connectivity partners in its marketplace, so culture reports do reach the resident chart. How a microbiology result arrives depends on each lab's interface. Organism and drug lines can come in as discrete values or as a formatted report, and the chart is built for reading one resident at a time, not for a year of isolates.

The lab that ran the cultures already holds them as data. Ask your reference lab or the hospital lab that serves you for a line list of every culture with a susceptibility result for your facility over the period: a resident identifier (hashed is fine), collection date, specimen source, organism, drug and the S, I or R the lab reported. Many regional labs already produce this for their nursing home clients.

Exactly which columns to ask for, and a sample request you can email the lab, are on nursing home antibiogram software.

1. 1

   Reference lab

   Every culture with susceptibilities for your building, for one to three years

2. 2

   CSV line list

   Resident ID, date, source, organism, drug and S, I or R

3. 3

   Antimicrobe

   First isolate per resident, 30 isolate flag, years pooled and labeled

4. 4

   Facility antibiogram

   Urine first, printed for the binder and posted where prescribers order

Is one nursing home's data enough for an antibiogram?

Often not for a single year, and the published numbers are clear about it. Fridkin and colleagues analyzed urine cultures from 231 CMS-certified skilled nursing facilities in Georgia sent to one regional referral lab in 2016 and 2017 (Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, 2019, PMID 31133088). In a single year 49% of facilities had enough E. coli isolates for a facility antibiogram, and only about 1 in 10 had enough Klebsiella pneumoniae, Proteus mirabilis, Enterococcus faecalis or Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

Their conclusion was that aggregating data across nursing homes in a region is a statistically sound way around the shortage. For a single building the practical answer is to report E. coli each year, pool two or three years for the other urine organisms with the years labeled, and show counts instead of percentages where the pool is still under 30. For an operator with several buildings in one region, pooling across facilities works too.

How CLSI M39 handles small counts and pooled years, rule by rule, is on CLSI M39 antibiogram software.

PointClickCare IPC, the AHRQ workbook and Antimicrobe compared

If you are still choosing an infection tracker, PointClickCare IPC, MatrixCare, HealthConnex and StewardshAPP are compared in antibiotic stewardship software for nursing homes.

Which plan fits a PointClickCare operator

A single skilled nursing facility needs the Lab plan: $249 a month for one facility, 25,000 isolates a year and two seats, so the director of nursing and the consultant pharmacist can both log in. It is bought by card with no implementation fee, and annual billing is half the monthly price.

Most PointClickCare customers are operators with several buildings, and that is where the antibiogram gets better rather than harder. Stewardship, $749 a month, covers up to three facilities. Network, $2,400 a month, covers up to twelve and adds cross-facility comparison, so a regional director can print one pooled antibiogram for the region plus each building's own, which is the approach the Georgia study supports.

Every limit is on the pricing page. If your pharmacy provider builds antibiograms for many client homes, the options for that work are in antibiogram software for long-term care pharmacy providers.

What this does not do

• It does not connect to PointClickCare or read the resident chart. It reads the CSV line list your lab exports
• It does not log infections, screen against McGeer or Loeb criteria or run antibiotic timeouts. Keep IPC for that
• It does not track antibiotic starts or days of therapy
• It does not reinterpret MICs. It uses the S, I and R your lab reported
• It does not report to NHSN