Background Contrast-induced acute kidney injury (CI-AKI) is associated with increased morbidity and mortality following percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI) and is a patient safety objective of the National Quality Forum. However, no formal quality improvement program to prevent CI-AKI has been conducted. Therefore, we sought to determine if a six-year regional multi-center quality improvement intervention could reduce CI-AKI following PCI. Methods and Results We conducted a prospective multi-center quality improvement study to prevent CI-AKI (serum creatinine increase ≥0.3 mg/dL within 48 hours or ≥50% during hospitalization) among 21,067 non-emergent patients undergoing PCI at ten hospitals between 2007 and 2012. Six ‘intervention’ hospitals participated in the quality improvement intervention. Two hospitals with significantly lower baseline rates of CI-AKI, which served as “benchmark” sites and were used to develop the intervention and two hospitals not receiving the intervention were used as controls. Using time series analysis and multilevel poisson regression clustering to the hospital-level we calculated adjusted risk ratios (RR) for CI-AKI comparing the intervention period to baseline. Adjusted rates of CI-AKI were significantly reduced in hospitals receiving the intervention by 21% (RR 0.79; 95%CI: 0.67 to 0.93; p=0.005) for all patients and by 28% in patients with baseline eGFR<60 ml/min/1.73 m2 (RR 0.72; 95%CI: 0.56 to 0.91; p=0.007). Benchmark hospitals had no significant changes in CI-AKI. Key qualitative system factors associated with improvement included: multidisciplinary teams, limiting contrast volume, standardized fluid orders, intravenous fluid bolus, and patient education about oral hydration. Conclusions Simple cost-effective quality improvement interventions can prevent up to one in five CI-AKI events in patients with undergoing non-emergent PCI.

Background Of patients undergoing cardiac surgery in the United States, 15–20% are re-hospitalized within 30-days. Current models to predict readmission have not evaluated the association between severity of post-operative acute kidney injury (AKI) and 30-day readmissions. Methods We collected data from 2,209 consecutive patients who underwent either coronary artery bypass (CABG) or valve surgery at seven member hospitals of the Northern New England Cardiovascular Disease Study Group Cardiac Surgery Registry (NNE) between July 2008 and December 2010. Administrative data at each hospital was searched to identify all patients readmitted to the index hospital within 30 days of discharge. We defined AKI Stages by the AKI Network definition of 0.3 or 50% increase (Stage 1), 2-fold increase (stage 2) and a 3-fold or 0.5 increase if the baseline serum creatinine was at least 4.0 (mg/dL) or new dialysis (stage 3). We evaluate the association between stages of AKI and 30-day readmission using multivariate logistic regression. Results There were 260 patients readmitted within 30-days (12.1%). The median time to readmission was 9 (IQR 4–16) days. Patients not developing AKI following cardiac surgery had a 30-day readmission rate of 9.3% compared to patients developing AKI stage 1 (16.1%), AKI stage 2 (21.8%) and AKI stage 3 (28.6%, p <0.001). Adjusted odds ratios for AKI stage 1 (1.81; 1.35, 2.44), stage 2 (2.39; 1.38, 4.14) and stage 3 (3.47; 1.85–6.50). Models to predict readmission were significantly improved with the addition of AKI stage (c-statistic 0.65, p = 0.001) and net reclassification rate of 14.6% (95%CI: 5.05% to 24.14%, p = .003). Conclusions In addition to more traditional patient characteristics, the severity of post-operative AKI should be used when assessing a patient’s risk for readmission.

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