Evaluating antimicrobial therapy: How reliable are remote assessors?

Abstract

Introduction Assessing the quality of antimicrobial prescribing provides hospitals with a means of targeting and measuring the impact of antimicrobial stewardship interventions. There are limited data available on the reliability of these assessments among different types of hospital assessors deployed away from the bedside (ie remotely). Importantly, it is unclear if assessors inexperienced in clinical infectious diseases can reliably evaluate the quality of antimicrobial prescriptions. This study sought to determine the reliability of assessments made by remote hospital assessors with different levels of clinical infectious diseases experience. These assessments were based on (1) concordan..