Lead by Dr. Rebekah Moehring, the DASON team worked through antibiotic use data to develop an electronic definition for de-escalation of antibiotics in hospitalized patients. their work was published in Clincal Infectious Diseases: an Official Publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
Antimicrobial stewardship programs (ASPs) promote the principle of de-escalation: moving from broad to narrow spectrum agents and stopping antibiotics when no longer indicated. A standard, objective definition of de-escalation applied to electronic data could be useful for ASP assessments. The electronic de-escalation metric demonstrated variation among hospitals, units, and diagnoses. This metric may be useful for assessing stewardship opportunities and impact.
View abstract on PubMed.