FOUR QUESTIONS FOR EMI MINEJIMA

FACULTY

Associate Professor of Clinical Pharmacy Emi Minejima, whose clinical practice is based at Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center, is an expert on infectious diseases. Her inspiration for entering the field came from mentor and now colleague Associate Dean for Research Annie Wong-Beringer, with whom she recently collaborated on a study published in March 2021 in Public Health Reports. Minejima also serves as a preceptor for pharmacy students and residents in acute care medicine and infectious disease clerkships. Here, she describes her practice, latest research, collaboration with Wong-Beringer and advice for students.

What are the most challenging and rewarding parts of your practice? Increasing antimicrobial resistance is a scary global health issue. Over the last decade, clinicians and governmental agencies have put more resources into improving how we utilize antibiotics so that we can continue to rely on these drugs to treat infections in the future.

Our program at LAC+USC Medical Center strives to improve our patients’ clinical outcomes by optimizing antibiotic prescribing through education, reporting, research and a lot of hard work from our team. The California Department of Public Health HealthcareAssociated Infection Program recently recognized us on its Silver-level Antimicrobial Stewardship Program Honor Roll for our interventions that demonstrate improved outcomes. Our residents and students are an integral part of this work. I hope the experience that our trainees receive during rotation will motivate them and excite them to be active stewards in their future roles. Tell us about your research with Annie Wong-Beringer on Staphylococcus aureus bloodstream infections. S. aureus bloodstream infections can be devastating and contribute to high rates of mortality if not treated quickly and effectively. The impact of socioeconomic status on the risk for mortality in S. aureus bloodstream infections has been evaluated in other countries but not in the U.S. Our work was a retrospective, multicenter study that included patients from LAC+USC, Keck Medical Center and Huntington Hospital, which serves a diverse population along the socioeconomic spectrum.

We collaborated with Lihua Liu, PhD [associate professor of clinical preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine], who geocoded the patients’ home addresses into the 2010 census block-