Evaluating a digitally-enabled care pathway for Acute Kidney Injury

A new publication highlights our work in evaluating a new patient pathway with the potential to provide clinicians with real-time data on inpatients at risk of Acute Kidney Injury.

AKI is common (affecting up to 20% of UK acute hospital admissions);  associated with significant morbidity and mortality, and expensive – excess costs to the NHS in England alone may exceed £1 billion per year.

Researchers at the Royal Free Hospital (RFH), part of London’s Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust (RFLFT) have developed a digitally-enabled care pathway for inpatients, incorporating  a mobile software application – the “Streams-AKI” app – that “reads” routinely collected serum creatinine data in hospital inpatients and alerts health professionals where a patient is at risk of AKI.

We have published our protocol for this evaluation, and a postcard-style “need to know” summary – or BITE – of our research plans. We’ll measure its success for patients (in terms of speed and effectiveness of their diagnosis and care), NHS staff and clinicians (to find out what they think of the pathway) and for the NHS in terms of patients’ length of stay and costs to the service.

The protocol and BITE will interest NHS staff and clinicians working in renal care, as well as those interested in the potential of technology to improve detection and diagnosis via routinely collected data