Most quality metrics for kidney disease fall short

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects 14 percent of adults in the U.S. There are several stages of CKD, but when it progresses to kidney failure, outcomes are quite poor, with those patients dying at a higher rate than patients with most advanced cancers. Patients who go on dialysis face both an exhausting treatment regimen and a high rate of death with 50 percent of patients dying within three years. Last July, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched the Advancing American Kidney Health initiative to try to improve kidney care. But this raised an important question in the medical community: How do you measure the quality of kidney care and the success of new innovations? A study published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology evaluated national kidney disease quality metrics—the benchmarks used today to measure kidney disease progression, patient outcomes and more—and found that more than half were of middle or low quality.