Penn Medicine, a part of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, announced a collaboration with hospital software development company Teqqa this week to develop a new software platform and mobile app that aims to help physicians prescribe the most effective antibiotics to patients.

The software will help clinicians conduct microbiology data analysis, and the app will help physicians, who are prescribing drugs to patients, access information about the antibiotics that would work best for their patients.

Currently most physicians are given updated information about the best antibiotics to use every nine to 12 months. This program aims to make this process near real-time.

The software will ideally minimize the risk of dangerous pathogens developing resistance to the antibiotics, which Penn Medicine said has been increasing at an alarming rate. Because patients' resistance patterns vary depending on the person's location, a drug that is appropriate for healing someone with a bacterial infection at one hospital may not be as effective at another hospital in a different region.

“The appropriate use of antibiotics to treat infections depends on knowing what antibiotics kill which bacteria,“ Dr. Keith Hamilton, associate director of Healthcare Epidemiology, Infection Prevention and Control and director of Antimicrobial Stewardship at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania said in a statement. “Predicting and understanding the trends and patterns of resistance allows clinicians to choose appropriate medications to treat a patient’s infection, and provides the health system real, actionable data to make broad recommendations for use of these life-saving drugs.”

Penn Medicine is an investor in Teqqa.