Canadian company partners with WHO to provide guidance on antimicrobial assistance
Global News
A Canadian health technology company has partnered with the WHO to provide new guidance for prescribing antibiotics to address the rising threat of antimicrobial resistance.
A Canadian health technology company that helps doctors make informed decisions about treatment of infectious diseases has partnered with the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide new guidance for prescribing antibiotics — an initiative aimed at addressing the rising threat of antimicrobial resistance.
The WHO’s new guidance — the first of its kind from the UN agency — provides clinicians with evidence-based guidance on how to best use antibiotics, including the choice of which antibiotic to use in different scenarios, how to dose it and for how long.
The guidance, based on recommendations from an expert committee that has been working on this initiative since 2017, will be available as a book and a mobile app.
Firstline, a company based in Vancouver, B.C., will provide the WHO’s “AWaRe antibiotic book” through a web and mobile app that will be openly accessible around the world, free of charge.
AWaRe is an acronym for ‘access, watch and reserve’ and is a classification system developed by WHO that delineates antibiotics into three different classes based on the impact they have on antimicrobial resistance.
“Inappropriate antibiotic use is one of the drivers of antibiotic resistance and the (Firstline) platform is one of the tools to disseminate information on how to use antibiotics appropriately contained in the WHO AWaRe antibiotic book,” said Dr. Benedikt Huttner, secretary of the WHO List of Essential Medicines, in a statement to Global News.
“We welcome all partners that support us in disseminating our guidance on how to best use antibiotics and help us reach more people… Smartphone applications are clearly an interesting way to widely disseminate information that can be available at the point of care,” he added.
Jason Buck, chief strategy officer and co-founder of Firstline, says the partnership with WHO was a natural one for his company, which is experienced at taking large amounts of evidence and information on infectious diseases and distilling it down into guidance suitable for use by doctors at the point of care.