Empiric Antimicrobial Therapy for Bacteremia: Get It Right from the Start or Get a Call from Infectious Disease

The difficulty in reporting microbiologic data has always been how to transfer this information to the treating physician in a timely fashion to optimize patient care. Exactly how to achieve this data transfer has always been problematic. The physician is not always informed of the preliminary microbiologic reports of blood culture data, particularly Gram stain results, even if reported to the ward or chart. Furthermore, the treating physician does not always interpret Gram stain information correctly or is often unable to relate Gram stain results to the clinical scenario [1-5]. The indication of "gram-positive cocci" in blood culture reports represents isolated information that, by itself, is unhelpful. If there are gram-positive cocci in blood cultures, the arrangement of the organisms must be stated (i.e., whether the grampositive cocci are arranged in pairs, chains, or clusters), which helps enormously. Additional helpful information includes the times between when blood culture samples were drawn and when blood culture results were determined to be positive. How many blood culture results are pos-