New clinical diagnostic instruments to address critical public health issues depend on a fundamental understanding of bacterial adhesion and growth at solid surfaces and the ability to control these processes. New technologies that decrease the time required for accurate identification and antibiotic susceptibility profiling of pneumonia-causing bacteria in intensive care units are one important example. Current methods require extended bacterial culture time and often force pre-mature clinical empiric antibiotic therapies, reducing positive patient outcomes and contributing to the emergence of resistant strains. Further, susceptibility testing from culture-based methods present a population-derived result and frequently can obscure the effects of minority sub-populations. We have developed a new microfluidics device that quantitatively tracks bacterial real-time growth rate and allows antibiotic susceptibility monitoring, reducing the overall time of a bacteria antibiotic challenge to less than 6 hours. Device performance with several bacterial strains and samples, and polymer coating surface characterization using protein, cell, bacterial and several surface analytical (e.g., XPS) measurements will be described. Application of this tool in the development of a fully integrated microfluidic system for automated bacterial growth and kill analysis will be demonstrated.