Reducing the Frequency of Surveillance Blood Work in Patients Treated With Maintenance Hemodialysis: A Local Quality Improvement Initiative
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: There is little evidence on the ideal frequency of routine blood work in maintenance dialysis patients to manage complications, including anemia, mineral bone disease (MBD), and hyperkalemia. Recent quality improvement studies from Ontario showed no negative impacts when decreasing the frequency from monthly to every 6 weeks in conventional in-center hemodialysis (ICHD) patients. In December 2020, Alberta Kidney Care-South (AKC-S) reduced the frequency of routine blood work from every 6 weeks to every 8 weeks for ICHD patients. Objective: We aimed to assess the impact of reducing blood work frequency on patient outcomes. Methods: We compared prevalent AKC-S ICHD patients in 2 cohorts: (1) retrospective control (October 31, 2019-October 31, 2020) and (2) prospective intervention (December 1, 2020-December 1, 2021). Primary outcomes were true frequency of routine blood work, odds of patients being within target for anemia and MBD, and proportion of lab values of hyperkalemia. Furthermore, we compared hospitalizations and mortality. Results: = .01). There was no significant change in the odds of being within the accepted targets during the intervention period compared with the control period for hemoglobin, Tsat, calcium, or parathyroid hormone (PTH). Fewer patients were hospitalized during the intervention period and the risk of death decreased as well, although additional factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic may have affected this. A cost-savings of $32 962 occurred from the reduced anemia and MBD blood work during the intervention period. Conclusions: When ICHD units in Calgary reduced routine blood work frequency from every 6 weeks to 8 weeks, there were no negative impacts on hospitalizations or deaths. A slightly lower proportion of phosphate values were within target, and a 0.7% increase in potassium values greater than 6 mmol/L was demonstrated. Our study suggests that blood work frequency in ICHD dialysis patients may be further reduced to every 8 weeks safely. Ultimately, additional pragmatic trials are needed to identify the optimal frequency of routine blood work.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".