Monitoring
In addition to routine clinical care, patients with IE should be reviewed at least once a week by the IE team, with ad hoc multidisciplinary meetings as needed depending on the clinical situation.[89] Patients should be monitored for persistent infection, defined as persistent fever and positive blood cultures after 7 days of appropriate antibiotics.[6] Blood cultures should be repeated after 48-72 hours after commencing appropriate antibiotics; persistent positive blood cultures are associated with an increased risk of in-hospital mortality.[6] Before completing antibiotic therapy, patients should receive transthoracic echocardiography to establish a new baseline. In addition, it is generally recommended that patients with prosthetic valve endocarditis undergo trans-oesophageal echocardiography at the completion of therapy. All patients should have blood cultures done at 1 and 2 weeks following therapy to ensure they are not persistently bacteraemic.[7]
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