Agreement Between LIAISON® MeMed BV® Finding and Clin-ical Impression Regarding the Presence of Bacterial Infection; A Letter to Editor

The MeMed BV® (MMBV) is a semi-quantitative assay that uses chemiluminescent immunoassay technology to measure three host proteins in adult and pediatric serum samples. The purpose of this pilot study was to assess the potential utility of the LIAISON® MeMed BV® (LMMBV) test as part of the diagnostic work-up for adult patients with suspected acute respiratory infections, sepsis, and/or fever without source presenting to the emergency department, including patients that had potential immune-modulating conditions or trauma that would have excluded them from previously published evaluations of this assay. The LMMBV assay identified suspected bacterial infections with a positive percent agreement (PPA) of 94.1% and a negative percent agreement (NPA) of 41.7% compared to overall clinical impression. These pilot findings suggest that the LMMBV assay performs with a high PPA for bacterial infections compared to clinical impression documented in the electronic health record (EHR), even in an adult patient population with potentially confounding conditions and co-morbidities that have not been studied before; research to further explore expanded use in this population is warranted. Laboratory testing, even when equivocal to the clinical impression, can improve healthcare providers’ confidence when making decisions of antimicrobial stewardship helping them justify (both to themselves and their patients) not empirically prescribing antibiotics in cases that the likelihood of a bacterial infection is low.