April 22, 2014
CDDEP’s Drug Resistance Index (DRI), which aggregates bacterial resistance to various drugs, was featured in this month’s issue of Managed Care.
The DRI was developed by CDDEP Director Ramanan Laxminarayan and former Emory University epidemiologist Keith Klugman with the aim of enabling researchers and health professionals to quantify and communicate changes in drug resistance over time and across locations. The method developed by the researchers, first described in a paper published in BMJ Open in 2011, combines the ability of antibiotics to kill bacteria with the extent of their importance (measured in terms of quantity used) to provide an aggregate trend measure of drug resistance similar to the way a stock market index summarizes the value of traded companies.
“We need an easy way to talk about drug resistance, a way that’s simple to understand for administrators who may not be medical professionals. The DRI is just that: a simple tool that shows the overall levels of transient resistance,” Laxminarayan told Managed Care.
A discussion of the DRI by CDDEP researcher Nikolay Braykov in 2012 highlighted the ability to apply the index at the level of individual medical facilities, where it can “directly inform physicians about the constantly evolving landscape of resistance”. Indeed, when the DRI was applied at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in New Delhi, one of India’s top medical facilities, it revealed alarming levels of resistance among Gram-negative bacteria in the institution.
The DRI is already in use in a number of institutions in India, Vietnam , and South Africa, as well as among some VA hospitals in Baltimore and Pittsburgh. Managed Care points out that wider use of the DRI could help hospitals have more success in implementing antibiotic stewardship and surveillance programs. “Hospital administrators tend to think that many cases of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) just come in with certain patients and there’s nothing they can do about it. But in fact, it is possible to do better than your neighbor hospitals even if patients are moving among nearby facilities,” Laxminarayan said in the article.
For more information about the DRI, or to speak to a CDDEP researcher, please contact Elyse Franko-Filipasic:
Email: [email protected]
Phone: (202) 328-5152
