Swab Testing to Optimize Pneumonia Treatment With Empiric Vancomycin (STOP-Vanc)

February 20, 2026 updated by: Jeffrey A Freiberg, Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Swab Testing to Optimize Pneumonia Treatment With Empiric Vancomycin (STOP-Vanc)

This is a single center, pragmatic, randomized clinical trial (pRCT) examining whether reporting the results of a negative rapid PCR back to the provider via a pager alert results in decreased vancomycin utilization for critically ill adults with community-acquired pneumonia when compared with usual care.

Study Overview

Status

Completed

Conditions

Intervention / Treatment

Detailed Description

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a critical antimicrobial resistant threat responsible for greater than 300,000 inpatient infections and 15,000 deaths per year in the United States. Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is a major driver of hospital antibiotic use. Nationally, there are around 600,000 CAP-related hospital admissions annually. However, MRSA is an infrequent cause of community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), accounting for less than 1% of cases. Despite this, MRSA is a frequently feared cause of CAP, which leads to the frequent use of vancomycin, an anti-MRSA antibiotic, in empiric CAP treatment.

Inappropriate antibiotic use can lead to avoidable adverse drug events and costs, as well as drive antimicrobial resistance. Empiric vancomycin use in patients hospitalized for pneumonia has demonstrated increased mortality, acute kidney injury (AKI), and secondary infections. The use of vancomycin is unfortunately associated with a high risk for toxicity and serious adverse events. Up to two-thirds of patients receiving high dose vancomycin develop AKI. Additionally, bone marrow suppression, linear IgA bullous dermatosis, anaphylaxis, and life-threatening hypersensitivity reactions are seen with vancomycin use. Furthermore, vancomycin is a costly antibiotic to use in the hospital as it requires careful monitoring due to its narrow therapeutic range and high risk of toxicity.

There is growing data to support the use of MRSA nasal swabs as a screening method to guide de-escalation of vancomycin use in CAP. A 2018 meta-analysis found using nasal swabs for MRSA screening had an overall 96.5% negative predictive value (NPV) for pneumonia, which was increased to 98.1% among patients with CAP or Healthcare-associated pneumonia (HCAP). Multiple retrospective studies along with one prospective study utilizing MRSA nasal swab-based de-escalation protocols have shown MRSA nasal swab use to be effective in decreasing vancomycin use and associated costs without having any negative effects on patient outcomes. Among these studies, significant decreases in hospital length of stay and rate of AKI have been shown. Furthermore, the use of MRSA detection in nasal swabs is now consistent with guideline-based management of CAP. However, all the aforementioned studies are quasi-experimental analyses. To date there are no randomized controlled studies of the use of MRSA nasal swab guided antibiotic de-escalation.

Study Type

Interventional

Enrollment (Actual)

277

Phase

  • Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

This section provides the contact details for those conducting the study, and information on where this study is being conducted.

Study Locations

  • United States
    • Tennessee
      • Nashville, Tennessee, United States, 37232
        • Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Participation Criteria

Researchers look for people who fit a certain description, called eligibility criteria. Some examples of these criteria are a person's general health condition or prior treatments.

Eligibility Criteria

Ages Eligible for Study

  • Adult
  • Older Adult

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

No

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

  • Adult (age greater than or equal to 18) patients admitted/transferred to the Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU) from the VUMC Emergency Department or from a hospital floor within 48 hours of admission.
  • Suspicion for pneumonia on admission (defined as an indication for antibiotics of "respiratory infection" and/or an order for a respiratory culture i.e., sputum culture, tracheal aspirate culture, or bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) culture).
  • No topical nasal decolonization during hospitalization prior to collection of MRSA nasal swab PCR.

  • Must match both of the following in either order:

    • The patient has been admitted to and physically located in the MICU.
    • The patient has received a continuing vancomycin order, or a pharmacokinetics consult for a continuing vancomycin order, no later than 24 hours following their physical admission to the MICU.

Exclusion Criteria:

  • Hospital stay of longer than 48 hours prior to MICU admission.
  • Known to be a prisoner

Study Plan

This section provides details of the study plan, including how the study is designed and what the study is measuring.

How is the study designed?

Design Details

  • Primary Purpose: Treatment
  • Allocation: Randomized
  • Interventional Model: Parallel Assignment
  • Masking: None (Open Label)

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm
Intervention / Treatment
No Intervention: No MRSA Nasal Swab
Subjects will not have a nasal swab collected.
Active Comparator: MRSA Nasal Swab
Subjects will have a nasal swab collected and sent to the clinical laboratory for the MRSA nasal swab PCR test to be run. For the subjects assigned to the intervention group who have a negative MRSA nasal swab PCR result, providers will receive a pager alert which inform them of the negative result and will direct clinicians to clinical guidance recommending clinicians to discontinue vancomycin, if clinically appropriate.
Diagnostic test: MRSA Nasal Swab PCR
For the subjects assigned to the intervention group who have a negative MRSA nasal swab PCR result, providers will receive a pager alert which inform them of the negative result and will direct clinicians to clinical guidance recommending clinicians to discontinue vancomycin, if clinically appropriate.

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Vancomycin-free Hours Alive
Time Frame: Baseline to seven days following enrollment.
The number of hours out of the seven days following enrollment in the trial that the patient is alive and not receiving vancomycin estimated using a proportional odds ratio model with the ordinal status levels being alive and not on vancomycin, alive and on vancomycin, or dead.
Baseline to seven days following enrollment.

Secondary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Time Alive Off Vancomycin
Time Frame: Baseline to seven days following enrollment.
The number of hours out of the 168 hours (7 days) following enrollment in the trial that the patient is alive and not receiving vancomycin.
Baseline to seven days following enrollment.
30-day All-cause Mortality
Time Frame: Thirty days following enrollment.
Mortality within 30 days with date of study enrollment as day 0.
Thirty days following enrollment.

Collaborators and Investigators

This is where you will find people and organizations involved with this study.

Sponsor

Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Investigators

  • Principal Investigator: Jeffrey Freiberg, MD, PhD, Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Publications and helpful links

The person responsible for entering information about the study voluntarily provides these publications. These may be about anything related to the study.

General Publications

Study record dates

These dates track the progress of study record and summary results submissions to ClinicalTrials.gov. Study records and reported results are reviewed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to make sure they meet specific quality control standards before being posted on the public website.

Study Major Dates

Study Start (Actual)

April 3, 2024

Primary Completion (Actual)

February 4, 2025

Study Completion (Actual)

February 27, 2025

Study Registration Dates

First Submitted

February 15, 2024

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

February 15, 2024

First Posted (Actual)

February 22, 2024

Study Record Updates

Last Update Posted (Actual)

February 27, 2026

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

February 20, 2026

Last Verified

February 1, 2026

More Information

Terms related to this study

Keywords

Additional Relevant MeSH Terms

Other Study ID Numbers

  • 231724

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?

YES

IPD Plan Description

Individual participant data that underlie the results reported will be made available (including data dictionaries) after de-identification.

IPD Sharing Time Frame

The data will become available 3 months following publication of outcomes and will remain available for at least 5 years.

IPD Sharing Access Criteria

Data will be made available to researchers who provide a methodologically sound proposal that has been approved by the Vanderbilt Institutional Review Board and the study executive committee.

IPD Sharing Supporting Information Type

  • STUDY_PROTOCOL
  • SAP

Drug and device information, study documents

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product

No

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product

Yes

product manufactured in and exported from the U.S.

No

This information was retrieved directly from the website clinicaltrials.gov without any changes. If you have any requests to change, remove or update your study details, please contact register@clinicaltrials.gov. As soon as a change is implemented on clinicaltrials.gov, this will be updated automatically on our website as well.

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