Specialty Pharmacy ContinuumUPMC Researchers Hone Alerts for Drug-Associated AKI

At the 2023 HIMSS meeting, Dr. Sandra Kane-Gill discussed a new alert system being developed at UPMC to improve care for patients at risk for drug-associated acute kidney injury (AKI). According to Dr. Kane-Gill, drugs are involved in approximately 30% of AKI cases in hospitalized patients, but imprecise alert systems mean that at-risk patients could be overlooked. To address this challenge, Dr. Kane-Gill led a consensus-building project to identify 20 drugs that are probably or definitely nephrotoxic with routine use.

UPMC has developed a prototype alert tool for AKI that uses this list of nephrotoxic drugs to accurately detect AKI in patients. Preliminary results indicate that for every five alerts generated, there was one case of drug-associated AKI, a higher accuracy rate than for other alert systems. Dr. Kane-Gill plans to further refine the alert tool before deploying it in practice at UPMC and is also interested in using machine learning to prevent episodes of kidney injury.