Aims:
Antimicrobial usage surveillance is a mandatory component of the National Safety and Quality Health Service (NSQHS) Standards required for hospital accreditation. The National Antimicrobial Utilisation Surveillance Program (NAUSP) enables both monitoring of usage trends and benchmarking to other peer groups for inpatient hospitals, however a similar system is not available for day hospitals or oncology centres. The aim of this study was to establish an automated system for antimicrobial usage reporting for a private day oncology hospital group, ensuring relevance to the patient cohort and treatment intent.
Methods:
The pharmacy team worked with a data analyst to identify the required data, including monthly antimicrobial utilisation reports, patient separation figures, and the appropriate antimicrobial drug and class inclusions. Each antimicrobial’s defined daily dose was mapped to enable collation of various formulations of the same drug, and appropriate comparisons between facilities. The PowerBI platform was used to develop visualisation reports, and the data was verified.
Results:
Automatic monthly PowerBI reports now generate once patient separation data and monthly drug usage figures are available. Visualisations enable day oncology sites to trend their own antimicrobial usage data over time, including total antimicrobial consumption with sub-analysis available for drug class, specific antimicrobials and particular formulations. These reports can also directly benchmark to other comparable facilities, enabling identification of excessive or unusual usage, or antimicrobials warranting further investigation or improvement.
Conclusions:
An automatic visualisation report, requiring no manual data entry or manipulation from facilities, has enabled each day oncology hospital across the group to appropriately monitor antimicrobial usage trends relevant to this specialised area of practice, enabling the identification of any areas of concern, and thereby fulfilling accreditation requirements of the NSQHS Standards.