National Kidney Foundation’s New Online Clinical Action Plans Help Clinicians Evaluate and Treat Chronic Kidney Disease

Twenty million Americans have chronic kidney disease and at least 20 million more are at risk. But early detection and intervention can help prevent the progression of chronic kidney disease to kidney failure.To help clinicians evaluate and treat the 20 million Americans who have chronic kidney disease (CKD), those with the disease and at increased risk,the National Kidney Foundation (NKF)has developed a series of CKD clinical action plans that are available at the NKF’s Kidney Disease Outcomes Quality Initiative (K/DOQI) web site: http://www.kdoqi.org. Users can download the clinical action plans to their PDA from the web site.

“Until now, there hasn’t been an effective tool to help clinicians diagnose and treat CKD, especially in its earliest stages,” explained Brian Pereira, M.D. and president of the NKF. “Using this new resource, clinicians can dynamically generate individualized clinical action plans based on patient data, such as the glomerular filtration rate (GFR) and the presence or absence of kidney damage, hypertension and/or diabetes. It’s an ideal resource for primary care physicians, nurse practitioners and nephrologists.”

After the clinician inputs patient data, the clinical action plans output the patient’s stage of CKD and treatment recommendations, providing links to relevant tables, charts and findings within the K/DOQI clinical practice guidelines

The CKD clinical action plans, a resource of NKF’s K/DOQI Learning System (KLS),are based on the five stages of CKD, as defined in the K/DOQI Clinical Practice Guidelines for Chronic Kidney Disease: Evaluation, Classification and Stratification, published in the American Journal of Kidney Diseases in February, 2002. As the foundation develops and publishes new clinical practice guidelines, these recommendations will be folded into the CKD clinical action plans so they will be continuously enhanced.