Arkstone launched Arkstone Next, an expert-in-the-loop AI platform that gives clinicians infectious disease guidance at the point of care. It serves sites where expertise is hardest to find: rural health clinics, urgent care centers, and skilled nursing and long-term care facilities.

According to CDC's new Antimicrobial Resistance Threats Report, the germs it tracks cause 9.7 million infections and 50,800 deaths in the U.S. each year. Overprescribing drives that resistance. CDC estimates that at least 28 per cent of outpatient antibiotic prescriptions are unnecessary. In urgent care alone, nearly half of antibiotics prescribed for common respiratory illnesses aren't needed. In nursing homes, up to 70 per cent of residents get an antibiotic each year, and as many as 75 per cent of those prescriptions are unnecessary or inappropriate.

Patients pay for antimicrobial resistance with increased drug side effects and treatments that fail. Facilities pay for it in readmissions, longer stays, and audit findings. Treating just six common resistant infections costs the U.S. more than $4.6 billion a year.

Most small providers have no infectious disease specialist, and susceptibility results alone don't tell a clinician what to prescribe." Arkstone Next fills that gap: helping clinicians choose the right drug, dose, and duration, or no drug at all.

"The biggest challenge clinicians face isn't a lack of information. It's turning information from many sources into the right decision, quickly," said Ari Frenkel, MD, MPH, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Arkstone. "Arkstone Next puts infectious disease expertise in the hands of every clinician, whether they work in a rural clinic, an urgent care center or a nursing home."