2nd Place Winner - 2023 Customer Awards: BioMerieux, Inc. - Community Uplift Award

[claurenlong]

Company: BioMerieux, Inc.

Company background: BioMerieux specializes in in vitro diagnostics, immunotherapy, food safety, nutrition, and antimicrobial stewardship solutions. The company was founded by the grandson of Marcel Merieux, a colleague of Louis Pasteur. Our company is dedicated to paving the way and improving the field to meet the challenges in public health and contribute to the medicine of tomorrow.

Contact: Lauren Long

Title: Visual Analytics Specialist

Country: United States of America

Award Category: Community Uplift Award

Tell how you've used SAS to have a positive impact on your community?
According to the CDC, at least 1.7 million adults in the US develop Sepsis, and nearly 270,000 die as a result. At BioMerieux, we provide blood culture and antimicrobial susceptibility testing solutions to not only aid clinicians in choosing the correct course of antibiotic treatment for a patient with Sepsis, but also in detecting their blood infection quickly and before it advances to a lethal stage.

Once a patient has developed Sepsis, their chances of survival depend on how quickly the correct antibiotic is administered. SAS Viya has aided our clinicians in the fight against Sepsis is through the visualizations I have created to show antibiograms. Antibiograms show the expected susceptibility and resistance to an antimicrobial that a given organism might have, based on past testing. Using the antibiogram I created in Viya, a clinician can quickly open the report, use a drop-down filter to select the organism a patient has tested positive for, and see a number of options for antibiotics that would be effective to fight this infection. Many antibiotics have serious side effects including kidney damage, so these antibiograms give clinicians options in treatment to not only be more targeted and efficient, but also to limit negative side-effects on the patient. The user-friendliness of SAS Viya has greatly helped in allowing us to show clinicians the antibiogram quickly and easily especially when time is of the essence. As crucial as antibiograms are, they historically have required a massive amount of manpower and time to create. We have been using the SAS suite of SAS Studio to create these antibiograms and then display them in Viya, saving countless hours of these clinicians’ time, whose increased bandwidth can now be spent providing better care to patients.

What SAS products are you using and how are you using them?
After years of antibiotic mismanagement, the rate of multi-drug resistant organisms is on the rise. The best way to fight this problem in the future is through timely and targeted antibiotic use. We use the SAS suite of products, particularly SAS Viya and SAS Studio, to cleanse, organize and create visualizations to display the antimicrobial susceptibility profiles of antimicrobials against pathogens. Our clinicians are shown this information through cross-tabs, bar charts, time series plots and are able to hone in on crucial information through the use of drop-down list filters and sliders. The user-friendliness of SAS Viya has allowed clinicians to drill down on exactly the pertinent information they need to treat patients before the patient condition has deteriorated beyond the time at which simpler courses of treatment are an option. These visualizations help the clinicians in our communities administer the right antimicrobial against the right organism at the right time to prevent and treat Sepsis and increase antimicrobial stewardship. Our efforts using SAS software are helping to make a healthier community for all.

What was your most surprising discovery about your work?
In order for a blood culture test bottle to grow bacteria to properly detect Sepsis from a blood sample, there is a very narrow range within which the phlebotomist or nurse must fill the bottle. If the bottle is not properly filled within the range of 7-11ml, then the life-saving ability of these tests is impeded. When thinking about the vast quantities of blood culture bottles drawn in a multi-hospital health system, it proves difficult to ensure that all phlebotomists and nurses are consistently filling these bottles within the proper range. We have developed a report in SAS Viya which clearly displays the number of blood culture draws month-to-month, the rate of under-filled, properly filled, and over-filled blood culture bottles, and the role and name of the person who drew the blood sample. SAS Viya has helped us to communicate this information clearly and concisely through the use of bar charts, cross-tab tables, and highlighting rules so that clinicians and hospital management can provide training to the individuals who are not properly filling these vital blood culture bottles. One hospital I work closely with originally thought my report was inaccurate because their rates of improper fill were so much higher than what they expected, however, it turned out that they had never seen their complicated data organized into one place to visualize the reality of the rate of inaccuracy of blood draws at their facility. In the following months, this hospital has implemented a number of training sessions for their nurses and phlebotomists as a result of our findings displayed in SAS Viya. This hospital's proper fill rate has increased every month since we brought this information to their attention using SAS Viya, and is still on the rise, meaning patients are receiving better care and more accurate testing in the hope of early detection and intervention against Sepsis.