Every Second Counts

March is National Kidney Month. Every 6.5 seconds in this country, someone is diagnosed with an Acute Kidney Injury. 4.9 million people in a hospital received that diagnosis in 2022, which means those happened or were discovered in the inpatient setting. For those of you who don't know, the kidney is arguably the most expensive organ; it accounts, through dialysis alone, for ~1 % of the federal budget and 6% of medicare expenses. I wrote a bit about this here: https://shorturl.at/bmPUV

The National Kidney Foundation reports that "Acute kidney injury (AKI), also known as acute renal failure (ARF), is a sudden episode of kidney failure or kidney damage that happens within a few hours or a few days. AKI causes a build-up of waste products in your blood and makes it hard for your kidneys to keep the right balance of fluid in your body. AKI can also affect other organs such as the brain, heart, and lungs. Acute kidney injury is common in patients who are in the hospital, in intensive care units" This causes a problem for patients because the kidneys are the body's filtration system.

So what is causing this? Many causes and one cause is that we manually manage the kidney and its critical vital sign: urine flow. We put a burden on nurses to keep urine flowing and when a dependent loop happens and they milk the foley it can also lead to CAUTI.? Clinical teams also have zero digital visibility into pressure building up inside the body, which damages kidneys. Even when we run a serum creatinine test, which research shows can lag actual kidney insult by 24-30 hours, we can already be behind the problem vs proactively and digitally staying in prevention mode. Compound that lack of information with? the fact that CMS is making systems report AKIs starting in October of 2024!??

Can you imagine asking a nurse to manually check blood pressure once an hour? Imagine walking into an ICU room and not having, for example, the Philips Intellivue device that continuously monitors and displays blood pressure, pulse ox, respiratory rate, temp, etc? Neither can I but for the kidney we don’t have digital data today.??

There is finally a way to move from the manual work of monitoring and managing the kidney to having a digital understanding of the kidney. Accuryn Medical has solved this by digitizing the kidney. The solution makes doing the right thing for the kidneys much easier than current solutions and makes the wrong thing, damaging kidneys, much harder. While it is a device, it enables the digitization and digital transformation of kidney care.

Accuryn's device ensures active drain clearance, measures and monitors urine flow and sends it to the EMR, gives clinical teams a digital KDIGO score, which can give a 24 hour heads up to potential kidney insult. If stage 1 kidney injury is caught and an escalation is prevented, then the kidney can be healed. If a kidney gets to stage 2 insult, the kidney is permanently damaged. As noted in my article link shared above, many systems have over a $100 million challenge (many have over a $250 mm problem) with AKI. Protecting patients, supporting clinical teams, and systems is why I discovered the Accuryn device. DM me if you want to know more.