MONITORING INPATIENT ANTIMICROBIAL USE

Measuring antimicrobial use is an important way to provide metrics that support more vigorous, facility-specific stewardship efforts, which in turn will be a major step toward reducing unnecessary use of broad-spectrum antimicrobials. Yet no single system is available that can meet stewardship needs at the level of individual hospitals and provide benchmarks, monitor trends, and measure the magnitude of antimicrobial use at the regional, state, and national levels. Therefore, distinct and complimentary efforts that remain focused on providing “data for action,” including facility-level use metrics for benchmarking across comparable patient care settings, national estimates of usage patterns using sentinel surveillance sites, and limited assessments using proprietary data.