Objective: To determine the best nursing home facility characteristics for aggregating antibiotic susceptibility testing results across nursing homes to produce a useful annual antibiogram that nursing homes can use in their antimicrobial stewardship programs.
Design: Derivation cohort study.
Setting: Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) certified skilled nursing facilities in Georgia (N = 231).
Participants: All residents of eligible facilities submitting urine culture specimens for microbiologic testing at a regional referral laboratory.
Methods: Crude and adjusted metrics of antibiotic resistance prevalence (percent of isolates testing susceptible) for 5 bacterial species commonly recovered from urine specimens were calculated using mixed linear models to determine which facility characteristics were predictive of testing antibiotic susceptibility.
Results: In a single year, most facilities had an insufficient number of isolates tested to create facility-specific antibiograms: 49% of facilities had sufficient Escherichia coli isolates tested, but only about 1 in 10 had sufficient isolates of Klebsiella pneumoniae, Proteus mirabilis, Enterococcus faecalis, or Pseudomonas aeruginosa. After accounting for antibiotic tested and age of the patient, facility characteristics predictive of susceptibility were: E. coli, region, year, average length of stay; K. pneumoniae, region, bed size; P. mirabilis, region; and for E. faecalis or P. aerginosa no facility parameter remained in the model.
Conclusions: Nursing homes often have insufficient data to create facility-specific antibiograms; aggregating data across nursing homes in a region is a statistically sound approach to overcoming data shortages in nursing home stewardship programs.