Enhanced Creatinine and Estimated Glomerular Filtration Rate Reporting to Facilitate Detection of Acute Kidney Injury

OBJECTIVES: While acute kidney injury (AKI) can be diagnosed based on specified increases in a patient's plasma creatinine level, standard creatinine reporting methods typically only flag creatinine results as abnormal when outside the reference range and often fail to identify rising creatinine values indicative of AKI. Here, we evaluate the impact of this limitation in standard creatinine reporting and develop and implement an enhanced creatinine reporting algorithm. METHODS: We evaluated 59,712 plasma creatinine results collected over approximately 3 months, using computational simulations and statistical analyses. RESULTS: Our analyses demonstrated that 29% of creatinine results substantially increased over the patient's baseline and concerning for AKI remained within the normal reference range. These concerning results would not be flagged as abnormal using standard reporting. Likewise, we found that simple delta checks are also insensitive at AKI detection. To improve creatinine reporting, we developed and implemented an algorithm within our laboratory information system to alert clinicians to rising creatinine results, which we describe in this report. CONCLUSION: While both creatinine reference limits and simple delta checks are insensitive for AKI identification, a simple algorithm can be implemented within a common laboratory information system to enhance AKI identification.