November 30, 2018 — VigiLanz and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center recently announced a collaboration that leverages Cincinnati Children’s research on pediatric nephrotoxic kidney injury and VigiLanz’s capabilities to commercialize a solution for acute kidney injury (AKI) in pediatric patients. Dubbed NINJA, or Nephrotoxic Injury Negated by Just-in-time Action, the solution enables real-time identification and monitoring of patients at risk for AKI due to exposure to nephrotoxic drugs.
“Pediatric acute kidney injury is a serious problem that traditionally could not be identified in real-time, which impacted our ability to identify the patients who most needed treatment,” stated Stuart L. Goldstein, M.D., FAAP, FNKF, director of the Center for Acute Care Nephrology and primary researcher on NINJA. “By partnering with VigiLanz, Cincinnati Children’s is applying our unprecedented research to a commercially available solution that accurately characterizes pediatric AKI epidemiology, reducing AKI and improving patient outcomes.”
Commercially available to hospitals and health systems focused on mitigating pediatric AKI, NINJA automates the time-consuming manual screening process of evaluating patients for exposure to 57 nephrotoxic medications, imaging contrast dye and recent renal testing. For medications, manual screening is limited to the last 24 hours; the contrast dye evaluation requires reviewing records for the previous seven days to determine if it was received by the patient.
Leveraging NINJA algorithms built into VigiLanz rules, an AKI monitoring dashboard lists all patients that meet the NINJA exposure criteria as well as the criteria that put the patient in the at-risk category. These criteria include medication exposure, serum creatinine data and patient history of AKI. When patients meet at-risk criteria, they are placed on the monitoring list in real time, where they remain until 48 hours after their risk has passed.
The platform also features metric outputs that can be customized with respect to service lines and time periods, while robust reporting tools provide the ability to trend conditions over time via automated run charts. It also enables automatic and customizable data extraction for all metric elements, including inpatient census by location or service line.
For more information: www.vigilanzcorp.com
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