Implementation and performance of the BioFire FilmArray® Blood Culture Identification panel with antimicrobial treatment recommendations for bloodstream infections at a midwestern academic tertiary hospital

• The current study reports an overall 80.4% sensitivity and 100% specificity for all organisms identified by culture during this study and a sensitivity of 94.6% when considering only on-panel organisms.
• The current study reports 7 failures of the BCID panel to detect on-panel organisms including 5 coagulase-negative Staphylococcus, 1 Staphylococcus aureus, and 1 Klebsiella oxytoca.
• The current study provides guidelines for antimicrobial therapy for all analytes on the BCID panel.
• Applying the provided antimicrobial recommendations to the reported BCID panel results would have hypothetically resulted in 99.2% of positive blood cultures being treated with appropriate antimicrobial therapy.

The FilmArray® Blood Culture Identification (BCID) panel was recently implemented at a midwestern academic tertiary care hospital to provide rapid identification (ID) of common pathogens from positive blood cultures. This study evaluated the clinical performance of the BCID panel compared to culture-based ID methods. One hundred thirty-eight monomicrobial and 8 polymicrobial blood cultures were evaluated during the 30-day study resulting in the ID of 152 total organisms by culture with 115 organisms correctly identified using the BCID panel. The BCID panel had sensitivities of 80.4% (115/152) for all organisms identified during the study and 94.6% (115/122) when considering only on-panel organisms. BCID panel specificity was 100%. Implementation of the BCID panel was coupled with the development of empiric therapy recommendations for bloodstream infections by the antimicrobial stewardship team. Based on this study, the FilmArray® BCID panel is a rapid and reliable test for the detection of common bloodstream pathogens, and therapeutic decisions can be based upon panel results.