Core Element 6 of the Antibiotic Stewardship Programs (ASP) series highlights the importance of regularly reporting information on antibiotic use and resistance to clinicians and relevant staff as a crucial part of a successful ASP.
Read through the examples of actions to support regular reporting of antibiotic use and resistance to see if your organization is on the right track.
| Basic | |
| 1 | Prepare regular reports on the measures being tracked related to antibiotic use. |
| 2 | Include an ASP report as a standing report to key stakeholders within the facility, e.g., pharmacy, patient safety, medical staff committees and the hospital board. |
| 3 | Hold quarterly staff meetings with physicians, with a permanent place on the agenda to share ASP data. |
| 4 | Post data on physicians shared webpage and distribute through emails. |
| 5 | Make ASP reports available to leadership, staff and patients. |
| 6 | Prepare unit-specific reports to distribute to individual hospital locations. |
| 7 | Consider reports that might be relevant to specific provider groups (e.g., surgical prophylaxis data for surgeons, urinary tract infections and skin infections for hospitalists) |
| Intermediate | |
| 1 | Include updates on progress reports towards meeting all hospital goals for antibiotic stewardship and recommendations for future improvements in reports. |
| 2 | Reports should include information on overall antibiotic use and trends, interventions accepted, and actions taken, and measures of appropriate use and outcome measures such as C. difficile infection rates and resistance. |
| 3 | Include concrete recommendations for improvement in reports. |
| 4 | Present “what we are doing and why we need stewardship” to the governing board. |
| 5 | Post unit-specific data in visible places to engage unit staff in stewardship. |
| Advanced | |
| 1 | Distribute provider-level information on antibiotic use and suggestions for improvement at the prescriber level, if possible. |
| 2 | Implement a real-time facility-specific dashboard for the ASP metrics available for all staff to view. |
Challenges to reporting stewardship data could include a lack of trust in the data and results, lack of consistent reporting, reporting perceived as punitive, untimely reports, lack of expertise in analyzing data and developing good reporting structure and an overwhelming volume of data. The ASP can be prepared to deal with those obstacles using these solution ideas.
- Ensure that the people interpreting data and preparing reports have appropriate expertise and use risk adjustment if available.
- Highlight results of successful improvement strategies.
- Have peers share the reports with specific departments (e.g., hospitalist with the hospitalist group).
- Establish clear expectations for frequency of reporting.
- Use measures and stories that resonate with clinicians and patients.
- Focus reports to providers on actionable information (e.g., compliance with treatment recommendations and performance of time outs).
- Frame reports with language that is nonthreatening and emphasizes opportunities for learning or mentoring.
- Tie reporting to syndrome-based reports (e.g., provide community-acquired pneumonia in winter).
- Seek expertise from other groups with experience creating hospital quality data reports (e.g., quality/patient safety department, infection control, health departments and regional quality improvement collaboratives).
- Target only top infection priorities for the facility at first, then expand to other initiatives later.
- Identify three metrics that can be understood easily by your team and hospital.
- Focus on one or two outcomes at a time.
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