The Path of More Resistance: a Comparison of National Healthcare Safety Network and Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute Criteria in Developing Cumulative Antimicrobial Susceptibility Test Reports and Institutional Antibiograms

In the absence of antimicrobial susceptibility data, the institutional antibiogram is a valuable tool to guide clinicians in the empirical treatment of infections. However, there is a misunderstanding about how best to prepare cumulative antimicrobial susceptibility testing reports (CASTRs) to guide empirical therapy (e.g., routine antibiogram) versus monitoring antimicrobial resistance, with the former following guidance from the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) and the latter from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN). These criteria vary markedly in their exclusion or inclusion of isolates cultured repeatedly from the same patient. We compared rates of nonsusceptibility (NS) using annual data from a large teaching health care system subset to isolates eligible by either NHSN criteria or CLSI criteria. For a panel of the three most prevalent Gram-negative pathogens in combination with clinically relevant antimicrobial agents (or priority pathogen-agent combinations [PPACs]), we found that the inclusion of duplicate isolates by NHSN criteria yielded higher NS rates than when CLSI criteria (for which duplicate isolates are not included) were applied. Patients with duplicate isolates may not be representative of antimicrobial resistance within a population. For this reason, users of CASTR data should carefully consider that the criteria used to generate these reports can impact resulting NS rates and, therefore, maintain the distinction between CASTRs created for different purposes.