Teaching a New Dog Old Tricks: Ultrafast Liquid Chromatography/Tandem-Mass Spectrometry Analysis of Nine ß-Lactam Antibiotics for Improved Therapeutic Drug Monitoring.

Time-critical results, such as those for β-lactam antimicrobials, may be reported by the TDM laboratory several hours earlier than current methods allow, providing improved patient care and generating capacity on LC-MS/MS instruments for larger batch sizes and/or additional assays. The simple-to-implement technique demonstrated in this study may be applicable to other TDM assays or any LC-MS/MS method where faster turnaround times are desirable.