{"doi":"10.1093/ajcp/aqab201","title":"Prevalence of Discordant Procalcitonin Use at an Academic Medical Center","abstract":"OBJECTIVES: Despite multiple trials demonstrating that procalcitonin (PCT) is an effective tool for antibiotic stewardship, inconsistent application in real-world settings continues to fuel controversy regarding its clinical utility. We sought to determine rates of concordance between PCT results and antibiotic prescribing in hospitalized patients. METHODS: We performed a retrospective review of all inpatient encounters at an academic tertiary care health system with a PCT result between February 2017 and October 2019. Concordant prescribing was defined as starting or continuing antibiotics following an elevated PCT (>0.5 ng/mL) finding and withholding or stopping antibiotics following a low PCT (< 0.1 ng/mL) finding. RESULTS: Antibiotic prescribing decisions were discordant from the PCT level in 32.5% of our sample. Among patients not receiving antibiotics at the time of testing, 25.9% (430 of 1,662) were prescribed antibiotics despite a low PCT result. Among patients already receiving antibiotics, treatment was continued despite a low PCT level in 80.4% (728 of 906) of cases. Enhanced decision support tools introduced during the study period had no impact on PCT use for antibiotic decisions. CONCLUSIONS: Overall concordance between PCT results and antibiotic use is relatively low in a real-world setting. The potential value of PCT for antibiotic stewardship may not be fully realized.","journal":"American Journal of Clinical Pathology","year":2021,"id":205191,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":3,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.8651,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":337811,"name":"Nicholas Bevins","orcid":"0000-0002-8073-5941","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":501494,"name":"Christina Wu","orcid":"0000-0001-6369-6189","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":314432,"name":"Robert L. Fitzgerald","orcid":"0000-0001-6050-8525","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":758516,"name":"Gregory Seymann","orcid":"0000-0002-5969-4209","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":22,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:51:30.197308Z","pmid":"34894127","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}