Introduction to Korean Antibiotics Physician’s Pocket (K-APP)

Thank you for visiting APP. We welcome you on behalf of all the members of Korean Society for Antimicrobial Therapy. To briefly introduce, APP is an application/website guide on the use of antibiotics that was created and provided by the Korean Society for Antimicrobial Therapy.

Recently, numerous guidelines have been created. Currently there are about 2,800 guidelines registered on the Guidelines International Network and about 2,400 guidelines registered on the National Guideline Clearinghouse. We believe that in order for a guideline to become a good guideline it must be trustworthy, regularly updated, have widespread distribution, and be user friendly for clinicians. The Korean Society for Antimicrobial Therapy has therefore decided to create and provide a guideline that is based on an application/website.

For this antibiotics application, we used the domestic guidelines (Korean practice guidelines) as the basis, configured the application with doctors of non-infectious diseases as its main target audience, and purposed it to be a clinical decision support system application that helps doctors make appropriate antibiotic prescriptions. Furthermore, we have formulated the application to be usable by anyone (open access), be simultaneously operational on both the application and the website (hybrid display), and have linked this application to the PK/PD application which contains the more professional antibiotics information (linkage with PK/PD app).

References used in the content development include 14 Korean guidelines, 35 American guidelines, 5 European guidelines, 4 miscellaneous guidelines that include WHO, 44 theses, and Mandell and Harrison textbooks. FDA fact sheet or the pharmacist’s package insert were referred to for antibiotics content development, and links to Medscape were set up for adverse reactions and drug interactions content.

We have briefly summarized the content as much as possible in order to induce easy usage. However, due to this decision there were limitations in including a more detailed content. Moreover, another deficiency is that because there are only a small number of guidelines available about children, the content of the application is mainly only about adults. We will henceforth improve the application through updates to contain better and better content. The application also has a feedback function through which any user can send his or her opinions or suggestions. If there is content that needs to be edited or updated, or if you have a good suggestion about the method of describing the content, please do not hesitate to send us your opinions and suggestions. Our review board will regularly review and apply these entries accordingly.

Thank you once again for visiting APP. We invite you to join us in advancing the APP into an even greater one.

Korean Society for Antimicrobial Therapy