Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City (SSMC) used Firstline to dramatically improve mortality rates, and reduce both length of stay and readmissions. Here’s how they did it.
Key Results
- 30-Day Mortality Rate: Decreased by more than half, from 21% to 10%
- Length of Stay: Fell from a median 8.5 days to 6.5 days
- 30-Day Readmission Rate: Dropped from 28% to 20%
Challenges
Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City (SSMC), a 750-bed tertiary hospital in Abu Dhabi established in 2019 in partnership with Mayo Clinic, provides a broad range of medical, surgical, and critical care services. Despite having antimicrobial guidelines available on the hospital intranet, an audit of a 3 month period revealed guideline compliance was below 60%. During that same time period, inpatient IV Vancomycin prescriptions increased by nearly 50% over the previous year. This raised concerns about prescribing practices and the team at SSMC saw an opportunity to better support clinical decision making to reduce prescribing errors.
Solution
Committed to enhancing clinical outcomes, SSMC became “the first hospital in the Middle East to develop and use Firstline, which is the world’s most prominent clinical point of care application for antimicrobial management” By integrating Firstline, SSMC standardized antimicrobial prescribing, ensuring clinicians had immediate access to concise, evidence-based recommendations at the point of care.
A peer-reviewed study published by the hospital in 2023 highlights the platform’s value:
"Mobile applications are a powerful tool for educating and supporting frontline clinicians prescribing antimicrobials."
The study emphasizes that a well-designed clinical support tool enables AMS teams to deliver the latest recommendations directly to prescribers in an easily accessible format.
Implementation
Integrating Firstline into existing workflows meant clinicians could instantly reference dosing, resistance patterns and empiric guidelines. SSMC also used Firstline to send notifications—such as new guidelines or changes in local resistance patterns—directly to user devices, ensuring that antimicrobial stewardship updates were timely and widely disseminated.
Impact
SSMC’s ECCMID poster results were based on patients with pneumonia, skin and soft tissue infections or urinary tract infections. After deployment, guideline adherence improved from 51% to 63%, with dramatic improvements in specific prescribing metrics like appropriate antibiotic choice (from 47% to 64%). Crucially, these gains translated into improved clinical outcomes, including a 2-day reduction in median length of stay, a drop in readmissions, and mortality rates dropping by half. By streamlining the point-of-care decision process, Firstline has proven integral to strengthening antimicrobial stewardship. The powerful results—reduced length of stay, fewer readmissions, and better survival—underscore the lifesaving potential of equipping clinicians with user-friendly, evidence-based guidance. Explore SSMC’s guidelines here.
