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.