Data and Benchmarking

Member hospitals of DASON will be encouraged to develop a data-driven approach to their local Antimicrobial Stewardship Programs. Analyses of hospital data with comparison to an external benchmark is the best way to review and direct program level decision-making and identify areas for improvement.

During the first 6 months of membership, DASON will work within local information technology infrastructures to create a streamlined system to collect pharmacy and microbiology data. Antimicrobial utilization and microbiology data will be available on a local database with specific analytic capability for use by local stewardship champions. Data can be analyzed over time by drug class, patient care unit, and targeted drugs.

Additionally, the local DASON database will routinely upload de-identified data centrally into secure Duke servers for DASON physician-epidemiologists and pharmacists to review and analyze. Benchmarked reports will be provided to compare each individual hospital’s data against the pooled network data.These reports will be designed to assist hospital administrators, pharmacists, and physicians working in stewardship to understand local trends, to identify areas for targeted intervention and to motivate behavior change when needed. Data analysis, statistical interpretation, and benchmarking will be reported twice a year with annualized aggregate data and risk-adjustment including detailed interpretation by DICON epidemiologists. Annual DASON benchmarks and descriptions of data analyses are available on the members-only section of this website.

The value of shared, time-trended data increases with time. As member hospitals remain in the network, the volume and value of the data will also grow, providing key information that helps hospitals better understand how their process improvement efforts have influenced practice and patient outcomes at their institution.

In addition, regular site-visits from DASON liaison pharmacists allow for regular review of “real-time” hospital data to track outcomes and identify targets for intervention. These visits will ensure that specific questions and educational needs are addressed and that the partnership between DASON and the member hospital is well-developed. Planning and implementation of specific institutional initiatives will be an ongoing goal of these site-visits.

DASON has passed both Antimicrobial Use (AU) and Antimicrobial Resistance (AR) Synthetic Data Set (SDS) Validation with NHSN. This allows us to fulfill the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) data reporting requirements for promoting interoperability. 

Finally, the process of data analysis on a per-hospital basis will be performed in parallel with larger, network-wide analyses by DASON physician-epidemiologists in order to assess the overall success of the Network as a whole. Since antibiotic stewardship is an emerging science, research in this field has been limited due to lack of outcomes data. We anticipate that the data from our integrated network will lead to research and performance improvement that will benefit member hospitals and patients throughout the United States.