Public-Private Effort Targets Heart Patients for Better Kidney Care

A public-private partnership has succeeded in demonstrating the ease of screening people with cardiovascular disease for chronic kidney disease as part of an innovative pilot project at seven Georgia hospitals.

Funded by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and coordinated by the Georgia Medical Care Foundation, or GMCF, with the aid of the National Kidney Disease Education Program, the year-long project showed that adopting glomerular filtration rate, or GFR, as the standard measure of kidney damage was well within the capacity of most hospitals.

Most facilities still evaluate kidney disease using an older measure of kidney function known as serum creatinine, a method that fails to take into account age, race, and sex. The challenge of the Georgia project was to see if hospitals would be able to change their internal processes to use the creatinine levels in combination with demographic details to determine the more-accurate GFR.

“The most gratifying part of the project was realizing how doable that reporting issue was,” said William McClellan, the clinical professor at the Emory University School of Medicine who led the effort at GMCF. “Hospitals have the capacity to change their lab reports pretty much at will.”

NIH Publication No. 06–4531
October 2005