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 an