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

Aproposed metric to quantify the impact of an antimicrobial stewardship program (ASP) is using changes in the antibiotic days of therapy (DOT) per 1000 patient-days, which is the total number of days any dose of an antibiotic is administered during a specified time period, standardized by the number of patient-days.1 Although DOT is useful for comparing antibiotic use among hospitals or time periods, this metric is a composite result of an ASP’s often multifaceted approach to improving antibiotic use. Thus, DOT provides a loose estimate of the direct impact of specific ASP activities and does not quantify the amount of antibiotics directly avoided or direct cost savings on the patient level. To ameliorate this, we reviewed our institution’s ASP prospective audit and feedback (PAF) and applied a novel metric, days of therapy avoided (DOTA), to calculate the number of antibiotic days avoided that directly result from our ASP’s actions targeting antibiotic stoppage. From DOTA, we also calculate attributable cost savings