No, data suppression does not count as an eligible exclusion. Please see the exclusions listed above. Data suppression prevents complete antimicrobial susceptibility data from being reported to the AR Option. We have observed that there are two types of suppression. The first is that the testing instrument suppresses the results for organism-drug combinations that are not supposed to be reported for microbiology purposes, such as ampicillin for Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The second is data suppression for the purpose of antimicrobial stewardship; for example, suppressing carbapenems for E. coli isolates that are susceptible to first, second, or third generation cephalosporins in order to reduce the use of carbapenems. For purpose #1, we would recommend keeping those results suppressed and not submitting them to NHSN. For the organism-drug combinations that are suppressed for purpose #2, generally we would recommend that, if feasible, allow labs to release complete AST results to the EHR and perform data suppression at the EHR level (as opposed to suppression at the susceptibility testing instrument or laboratory information system level). This way, complete data will still be available in the EHR and theoretically should be available for data extraction and submission for surveillance purposes. You might need to work with your microbiology lab to identify which combinations belong to which purpose. However, if your hospital cannot obtain and/or send suppressed data to the NHSN AR Option, NHSN will accept the data your hospital is able to provide. Please be sure that your AUR reporting software vendor is using ‘Not Tested’ for the unavailable tests/drugs. The NHSN application will not accept AR Event CDA files that do not contain all the required drugs for a given organism.