Time to blood, respiratory and urine culture positivity in the intensive care unit: Implications for de-escalation.

Objectives: Concern for late detection of bacterial pathogens is a barrier to early de-escalation efforts. The purpose of this study was to assess blood, respiratory and urine culture results at 72 h to test the hypothesis that early negative culture results have a clinically meaningful negative predictive value.

Methods: We retrospectively reviewed all patients admitted to the medical intensive care unit between March 2012 and July 2018 with blood cultures obtained.