Following the incorporation of EUCAST and CLSI sourced antimicrobial susceptibility breakpoints into importable files earlier this year, we have now extended this process to encompass what are known as "expert rules", published by the same standards bodies and closely related to the breakpoints. These expert rules provide context specific guidance, such as whether a specific susceptibility result is suspect and should be re-checked, whether it is significant and should be notified to relevant authorities, whether a susceptibility result for one antibiotic implies a susceptibility or otherwise for one or more other antibiotics, etc. In SEDRI-LIMS, they are importable as "alerts", a generic capability of the system that allows notifications to be triggered based on any entered test result or combination of results. As such, alerting lends itself perfectly to the triggering and notification of expert rules.
For the time being, only EUCAST expert rules are covered. This is because they are decoupled from the breakpoint data and associated guidance and provided in a structured format in a separate document. CLSI expert rules, by contrast, are embedded in the breakpoint guidance itself and need careful extraction and future tracking. This will be handled in due course (look out for an update), as will be the optional enforcement of expert rules (where applicable), an enhancement already requested by multiple clients.
Article first published: 09/03/23