Respiratory Cultures
A minority of cultures (13.4%) had isolation of one or more pathogenic respiratory organisms (Table 2 ). Compared with nonpathogenic culture results, cultures with pathogen identification were more likely collected among younger children (median age at culture 0.7 years vs 1.3 years, p<0.001) and children with a concurrent ICD-9 or ICD-10 diagnosis of ARI during the specified encounter (45.7% vs. 31.6%, p<0.001). Cultures with pathogens were more frequently of tracheostomy aspirate source than bronchoalveolar lavage (87.2% vs 63.0%, p<0.001).
Overall, 22 pathogenic organism species were identified in respiratory cultures from this population. The most frequent pathogens identified were P. aeruginosa and S. aureus, which were identified in 5.1% and 4.7% of all cultures respectively (Table 2 ).