***As presented at the VSHP Awards Ceremony, November 4, 2022***
The 2022 VSHP Clinical Practice Achievement Award recipient is an infectious diseases pharmacist at Carilion Clinic who leads the inpatient antimicrobial stewardship program for the health system. She has impacted pharmacy practice and patient outcomes in 3 key areas. Over the past two years, she has led the creation of inpatient treatment guidelines for COVID-19 and assisted with vaccine education across the health system. She was also instrumental with implementing a novel approach to managing CDI utilizing a clinical decision support-designed order set for all treatment medications and expanded use of a novel agent, fidaxomicin, which reported superior outcomes to oral vancomycin. The AMS Team worked closely with case management and the Carilion Medication Assistance Program to design a process to obtain this high-cost treatment course for almost every patient who needed it. The recipient led grant-funded research to evaluate the impact of the clinical decision order set and found after implementation readmission rates dropped from 18.9% to 8.5% and clinical cure with no recurrence rates increased from 55.9% to 73.3%. Overall effects of the program from 5/2018-5/2022 included 438 patients treated with CDI, 44 readmissions prevented, 876 bed days saved and a cost savings of $976,280. This process pathway and evaluation was published in Infectious Diseases and Therapy this year. In 2020, she also implemented a process for the antimicrobial stewardship pharmacists to review every patient with Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia or Candidemia in the health system. Previous literature as well as internal research at Carilion Clinic identified this as an area where infectious diseases consult could have a large impact on patient care including mortality. Ultimately, she was able to implement automatic ID consults for patients with S. aureus bacteremia or Candidemia in July 2022.
Congratulations to the VSHP Clinical Practice Achievement Award winner for 2022, Lauren McDaniel!
