More Specialties, Less Problems: Using collaborative competency between Infectious Disease, Podiatry, and Pathology to improve the care of patients with diabetic foot osteomyelitis

BACKGROUND: Diabetic Foot Osteomyelitis (DFO) is a common infection where treatment involves multiple services including Infectious Disease (ID), Podiatry, and Pathology. Despite its ubiquity in the hospital, consensus on much of its management is lacking. METHODS: Representatives from ID, Podiatry, and Pathology interested in quality improvement (QI) developed multidisciplinary institutional recommendations culminating in an educational intervention describing optimal diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to DFO. Knowledge acquisition was assessed by pre- and post-intervention surveys. Inpatients with forefoot DFO were retrospectively reviewed pre- and post- intervention to assess frequency of recommended diagnostic and therapeutic maneuvers, including appropriate definition of surgical bone margins, definitive histopathology reports, and unnecessary intravenous antibiotics or prolonged antibiotic courses. RESULTS: A post-intervention survey revealed significant improvements in knowledge of antibiotic treatment duration and the role of oral antibiotics in managing DFO. There were 104 consecutive patients in the pre-intervention cohort (4/1/2018-4/1/2019) and 32 patients in the post-intervention cohort (11/5/2019-03/01/2020), the latter truncated by changes in hospital practice during the COVID-19 pandemic. Non-categorizable or equivocal pathology reports decreased from pre-intervention to post-intervention (27.0% vs 3.3%, respectively, P=0.006). We observed non-significant improvement in correct bone margin definition (74.0% vs 87.5%, p=0.11), unnecessary PICC line placement (18.3% vs 9.4%, p=0.23), and unnecessary prolonged antibiotics (21.9% vs 5.0%, p=0.10). Additionally, by working as an interdisciplinary group, many solvable misunderstandings were identified, and processes were adjusted to improve the quality of care provided to these patients. CONCLUSIONS: This QI initiative regarding management of DFO led to improved provider knowledge and collaborative competency between these three departments, improvements in definitive pathology reports, and non-significant improvement in several other clinical endpoints. Creating collaborative competency may be an effective local strategy to improve knowledge of diabetic foot infection and may generalize to other common multidisciplinary conditions.