Arkstone’s Treatment Recommendations Now Include Realtime National Institutes of Health (NIH) Data

BOCA RATON, FL, March 13, 2023 — Arkstone Medical Solutions, the leading provider of laboratory infectious disease reporting and proactive antimicrobial stewardship, has once again raised the bar in infectious disease analysis for laboratory results, by incorporating antibiotic resistance statistics from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to enhance the already groundbreaking OneChoice targeted treatment recommendations. This integration will provide healthcare professionals with more accurate and up-to-date information on antibiotic resistance, enabling them to make more informed decisions when prescribing medications to their patients.

Antibiotic resistance is a growing concern in the healthcare industry, with an estimated 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occurring in the United States each year. Arkstone’s solutions have already helped thousands of healthcare providers, and hundreds of thousands of patients by providing the OneChoice Report with its innovative and informative overreads of laboratory results. The OneChoice decision engine uses advanced technology that weighs many different factors when analyzing a laboratory result. When indicated, the report provides a suggested optimal treatment regimen that safely and efficiently treats the patient and properly targets the detected infection. This helps avoid unnecessary exposure to medications, reduces the risk of drug toxicity and side effects to the patient, and helps fight the rise of antimicrobial resistance.

Modern molecular lab testing, such as PCR, unlocks a wealth of information for healthcare providers, most notably the detection of antimicrobial resistance genes. This can be a valuable tool, but it can often be confusing and difficult for many healthcare providers to apply in practice, as they may be more familiar with traditional methods of microbiology such as cultures and stains. One critical challenge is that while PCR can determine the presence of resistance genes it cannot determine which pathogens expressed the genes. In turn, when faced with this information many healthcare providers overprescribe, or ignore the information altogether.

OneChoice already interprets the resistance genes detected by the lab and guides the clinicians with information as to what microbe may be expressing the gene, and how antibiotics may be affected as a result based on the most up-to-date available peer review literature and evidence. The presence of a resistance gene may not always preclude the use of a particular antibiotic since the genes detected are only relevant in certain organisms, and may not be relevant to the pathogens detected. The NIH has been collecting lab result isolate data for decades, compiling information about the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance genes in specific organisms. This data is collected from clinical and public health laboratories across the country and provides a comprehensive insight into which organisms are likely to express which genes.

“For most scientists, how to appropriately use microbial resistance gene data to treat patients effectively, has presented a serious challenge” explains Dr. Frenkel infectious disease specialist, and Co-Founder & Chief Science Officer of Arkstone. “Not only do OneChoice and MedsMatrix provide a direct link to the literature and evidence behind each recommendation with their correlations, now with real-time NIH data demonstrating trends in resistance gene detection, there is truly nothing left off the table, giving healthcare providers what they need to prescribe with confidence.” Arkstone now incorporates this data into the already valuable MedsMatrix which gives providers a visual view of which organisms are pathogenic, and which drugs have activity. By hovering over icons in the MedsMatrix, providers can see the statistical incidence of these resistance genes, or genes in their class correlated with the respective organisms detected.