A team from the Northern Territory's Top End Health Service is using a clever, in-house designed system that combines reports from the pathology and prescribing databases in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, processes them through a series of rules and is then able to identify potentially life-threatening drug-bug or dose mismatches.

While the developers are not considering commercialising the system and are happy to give it away as freeware, they have come up with a nifty acronym – AMSID, for AntiMicrobial Stewardship Identification – and more importantly believe that they have come up with a quality improvement initiative that can have a significant impact on patient safety.