ACORN 2.0 - A Clinically Oriented antimicrobial Resistance Network

The ACORN project will establish a network of hospitals and clinical laboratories in Asia and Africa to implement efficient patient-focused antimicrobial resistance (AMR) surveillance.

Network data will be used to determine AMR disease burden, risk factors, and patient and economic impacts for key clinical syndromes and associated pathogens.

ACORN will address the need for better systems for linked clinical and microbiology data analysis to enable clinicians and ministries of health to understand and respond to the locally and nationally relevant AMR challenges and to engage meaningfully with international surveillance efforts.

ACORN will provide simple to use data collection, visualisation, and analysis tools along with a framework for sites to improve clinician utilisation of diagnostic microbiology resources.

Targeted clinical and outcome data collection will enable local use of pathogen and antimicrobial susceptibility data, for example by identification of high-risk patients and for development of empiric treatment guidelines.

Global AMR surveillance and mitigation endeavours are weakened as a result of limited active healthcare provider engagement via local data use.

Project engagement efforts will focus on promotion of widespread adoption of ACORN, through collaborative links with key AMR stakeholders, to ensure that future global surveillance has meaning, from the ground up.