Effect of Patient and Provider Education on Antibiotic Overuse for Respiratory Tract Infections

Antibiotic overuse for respiratory tract infections (RTIs) in primary care (PC) is a known important contributor to the serious health threat of antibiotic resistance, yet remains a difficult problem to improve. The purpose of the study was to assess the effects of a combination patient and provider education program on antibiotic prescribing in RTIs in a rural primary care clinic. Utilizing a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design, a retrospective electronic medical record review was conducted to determine if a patient and provider education program changed the rates of antibiotics being prescribed (immediate or delayed) during a visit for RTI for 207 randomly selected patients during the established evaluation time periods. The antibiotic prescription rate for the preintervention group was 56.3% compared to 28.8% for the postintervention group (p <.01). Immediate antibiotics were ordered in the preintervention group 31.1% of the time compared to 13.5% for the postintervention group (p <.05). The results of this study demonstrate that educational interventions can be effective in rural settings and that changes in antibiotic prescribing are possible.