DOI: 10.13189/ujcm.2013.010101 Time to Antibiotics and Hospital Length of Stay in Emergency Department Patients Admitted for Pneumonia: A Retrospective, Cross-Sectional Analysis

findings regarding timing of antibiotic delivery in patients admitted for pneumonia and clinical outcomes. We hypothesized that there is no association between the time to antibiotics and the hospital length of stay (LOS) for patients admitted from the emergency department (ED) to the hospital for pneumonia.Objective: To compare the hospital LOS of patients admitted from the ED to the hospital for pneumonia based on the interval between ED arrival and first dose of antibiotics categorized to four hours or less, four to six hours, and greater than six hours.Methods: We conducted a retrospective chart review at a single inner city ED on patients who had admitting and discharge diagnoses of pneumonia and received antibiotics in the ED over a 17 month period. Using structured abstraction sheets, a trained reviewer identified cases and abstracted data on hospita