Expert Consensus on Metrics to Assess the Impact of Patient-Level Antimicrobial Stewardship Interventions in Acute-Care Settings
Antimicrobial stewardship programs (ASPs) positively impact patient care, but metrics to assess ASP impact are poorly defined. We used a modified Delphi approach to select relevant metrics for assessing patient-level interventions in acute-care settings for the purposes of internal program decision making. An expert panel rated 90 candidate metrics on a 9-point Likert scale for association with 4 criteria: improved antimicrobial prescribing, improved patient care, utility in targeting stewardship efforts, and feasibility in hospitals with electronic health records. Experts further refined, added, or removed metrics during structured teleconferences and re-rated the retained metrics. Six metrics were rated >6 in all criteria: 2 measures of Clostridium difficile incidence, incidence of drug-resistant pathogens, days of therapy over admissions, days of therapy over patient days, and redundant therapy events. Fourteen metrics rated >6 in all criteria except feasibility were identified as targets for future development.
Source: Clinical Infectious Diseases - Category: Infectious Diseases Authors: Moehring, R. W., Anderson, D. J., Cochran, R. L., Hicks, L. A., Srinivasan, A., Dodds Ashley, E. S., for the Structured Taskforce of Experts Working at Reliable Standards for Stewardship (STEWARDS) Panel Tags: Invited Article Source Type: research
More News: Clostridium Difficile | Electronic Health Records (EHR) | Hospitals | Infectious Diseases