No abstract

In recent years, the global public health community has increasingly recognized the importance of antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) in the fight to improve outcomes, decrease costs, and curb increases in antimicrobial resistance around the world. However, the subject of antifungal stewardship (AFS) has received less attention. While the principles of AMS guidelines likely apply to stewarding of antifungal agents, there are additional considerations unique to AFS and the complex field of fungal infections that require specific recommendations. In this article, we review the literature on AMS best practices and discuss AFS through the lens of the global core elements of AMS. We offer recommendations for best practices in AFS based on a synthesis of this evidence by an interdisciplinary expert panel of members of the Mycoses Study Group Education and Research Consortium. We also discuss research directions in this rapidly evolving field. AFS is an emerging and important component of AMS, yet requires special considerations in certain areas such as expertise, education, interventions to optimize utilization, therapeutic drug monitoring, and data analysis and reporting.

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.Keywords. antimicrobial stewardship; patient safety; process measure; outcome measure; quality metrics. We aimed to gain expert consensus on a list of metrics both useful for assessing the impact of patient-level antimicrobial stewardship interventions and feasible to measure in acutecare hospitals with an electronic health record. The goals of this study were not to identify quality metrics to be used for external comparisons or value-based incentives, but rather to identify metrics most pertinent for internal ASP decisions. METHODSWe performed a modified Delphi, expert consensus-building process to identify metrics useful for tracking the impact of patient-level antimicrobial stewardship interventions. The method differed from the Delphi process developed by the RAND Corporation because it did not include face-to-face meetings [5]. Rather, Web-based teleconferences and electronic surveys enabled the geographically diverse group of experts to participate without logistical barriers. The steps of the process included a comprehensive literature review to develop a candidate metrics list, 2 rounds of electronic surveys for metric rating, data collection, analyses, and feedback to the panel members, and structured, Web-based teleconference discussions between the electronic survey rounds.