Identifying Hospital Antimicrobial Resistance Targets via Robust Ranking.

We develop a robust ranking procedure to uncover trends in variation in antibiotic resistance (AR) rates across hospitals for some antibiotic-bacterium pairs over several years. We illustrate how the method can be used to detect potentially dangerous trends and to direct attention to hospitals' management practices. A robust method is indicated due to the fact that some unusual reported resistance rates may be due to measurement protocol differences and not any real difference in AR rates.