Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Patientrack team up in bid to help prevent acute kidney injury

Alerting technology from Patientrack, along with existing data sources, will be used to prevent AKI, which costs the NHS between £434m and £620m every year

Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has been working alongside Patientrack, an IT provider for the NHS, to develop a system to automatically detect and help prevent acute kidney injury (AKI), which is believed to be linked to as many as 100,000 deaths in UK hospitals every year, at a cost to the NHS of between £434m and £620m.

Dr Richard Venn, a consultant in anaesthesia and intensive care at the trust, said that the idea behind the solution was to identify people at risk so that they could stop them from developing AKI, as well as stopping AKI from progressing with those who have already been diagnosed.

"When [someone] has an episode of an acute kidney injury it affects the rest of their life - it's a scar - it puts them at increased risk of cardiovascular disease, so even though it may seem relatively benign or that it can easily be fixed - the long-term consequences are significant," he told Computing.

The trust took its time to develop a tool that could detect people at risk.

"We've got that now, with the algorithm being built in the Patientrack model, so patients with AKI are flagged up, but so are the ones who are at risk," Dr Venn said.

Dr Venn explained that the system could be a "major breakthrough" for the NHS as about 20 per cent of medical admissions are at risk of AKI during their hospital stay.

Professor Lui Forni, a consultant in intensive car and renal medicine, and adviser to the project, said that the Patientrack technology has evolved from taking observations on patient bedsides, such as temperature, blood pressure and heart rate - to being able to incorporate a risk scoring model to tell clinicians how sick the patients are in hospital, or even at home.

"What we want to do with that technology is integrate it with other research that we have done, so that we can glean other data which is useful for the patients who are at risk from AKI," he said.

The complete solution will include data such as medical conditions and age from the trust's systems, pathology data on kidney injuries and Patientrack observations.

"So when patients are in the hospital they either show as a green flag (they don't have it), a red flag (they do have it), or an amber flag (they are at risk)," said Professor Forni.

"This is then explained on the patients' chart in real-time so that doctors and nurses know what category the patient is in, and once they are alerted they are told to confirm what the next steps are - at the relevant time periods necessary, so it's not just for alerting doctors but having to take action as well," he explained.

Western Sussex NHS Foundation Trust had already been using Patientrack prior to developing the AKI solution.

"[Patientrack] has competitors but our idea was to develop these tools so that we could use Patientrack, and for those who don't have Patientrack, they should also be able to use these AKI alerts as well," Professor Forni said.

He explained that the Patientrack AKI warning system could be scaled across the NHS as a result of a new funding win from a multi-million pound Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) competition.

"Part of the money we received from the grant was to develop this technology for Patientrack and non-Patientrack hospitals, so it could be used in all hospitals," he said.

The system received Department of Health funding last summer so that it could be developed and trialled with Western Sussex hospitals.