Days of Therapy Avoided: A Novel Method for Measuring the Impact of an Antimicrobial Stewardship Program to Stop Antibiotics

The limitations of measuring DOTA include time consumption, particularly if not collected prospectively. However, we make several conclusions. ASP PAF stopping antibiotics was well accepted and reduced antibiotic use. Second, calculating DOTA requires little technology and only knowledge of the planned LOT and drug costs. DOTA also identifies which infectious indications to focus PAF efforts on and gain the greatest impact. Overall, DOTA is a simple, useful, and promising measurement of the direct antibiotic and economic impacts of specific ASP PAF and warrants further investigation as an ASP metric.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the patients and RGH staff, particularly the departments of infectious diseases, pharmacy, and internal medicine, for their support.

Disclosure

The authors declare no conflicts of interest. This study was previously presented in poster form at the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America Spring Conference in St. Louis, Missouri (March 29-31, 2017).