The recent global blood culture bottle shortage forced hospitals to implement new diagnostic stewardship programs. In this brief report, we describe our approach as a multicenter hospital network through a system-wide memorandum and the implementation of a best practice advisory, which decreased the use of blood cultures without negatively affecting the sepsis-related mortality rate.
Keywords: blood culture bottles; blood cultures; diagnostic stewardship; sepsis; supply shortage.
© The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Infectious Diseases Society of America.