Antimicrobial stewardship is crucial to the ongoing viability of existing therapies. To facilitate this stewardship, NHSN allows hospitals to submit data on their antimicrobial usage and receive feedback on how their usage compares to other facilities.1 This feedback can be used by hospital personnel to assess whether their antimicrobial policies are consistent with current best practices. Participation in this program has so far been limited. There are several barriers to participating, including the challenge of mapping local medication information to the NHSN list of antimicrobials, the burden of tabulating the necessary statistics, and the technical requirements of generating appropriate CDA documents for submission. An automated solution that obtained the necessary data from existing HL7 interfaces and generated CDA documents in the correct format could significantly lower some of the barriers to submitting antimicrobial usage information to NHSN.
Objective: To leverage existing healthcare transaction messages to automate the aggregation of antimicrobial usage statistics in a method compatible with submission to the National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) Antimicrobial Usage module.