Big Datasets in Antibiotic Allergy: What's the Story?

A different group of 29,095 subjects in outpatient community health centers in the Miami, FL area showed a similar prevalence of penicillin allergy (9.1%)3 as Liang et al. Prior carbapenem and monobactam allergy data have generally been from smaller studies or specifically studied in the context of existing penicillin allergy.4 True clindamycin allergy is rare,5 and the clindamycin prevalence of 0.4% reported by the authors mirrors a previously reported prevalence in 3896 patients from 1999.5 The fact that the prevalence figures demonstrated by Liang et al agree with smaller preceding studies speaks to the completeness of the authors' reported data. Banerji et al10 recently submitted their work on natural language processing (NLP), where a rule-based NLP algorithm developed by manual chart review and used with billing codes improved the positive predictive value to identify true allergic reactions to drugs.