Electronic Alerts Do Not Necessarily Improve Care for Kidney Patients

The use of electronic alerts by hospitals treating patients with acute kidney injury may increase interventions without improving care, a study by Yale researchers found.

The study was published February 25 in The Lancet.

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a serious condition that can lead to dialysis and even death in hospitalized patients. To prevent these adverse outcomes, some hospital systems have proposed using electronic alerts to detect the condition at an early stage. To test the effectiveness of an alert system, first author F. Perry Wilson, MD, MSCE, assistant professor of medicine at Yale, and his co-authors conducted a randomized trial with 2400 patients at the Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Read the press release from Yale: http://bit.ly/1DuTtAD