Improving the completeness of acute kidney injury follow-up information in hospital electronic discharge letters.

Objectives: Acute kidney injury (AKI) is common in hospitalised patients, often mandates changes to regular medications and can be unresolved at hospital discharge. General practitioners (GPs) require apposite AKI-related information in electronic discharge letters (EDLs). In 2015 NHS England introduced a care quality standard that all EDLs should include four items of information for patients with AKI. We performed a 12-month quality improvement project (QIP) aimed at achieving above 90% compliance with the quality standard.

Methods: Hospital-wide episodes of AKI were detected using the nationally approved electronic AKI alerts system. 25 patient AKI episodes were audited per month for 12 months using the electronic patient record. The target compliance rate was staggered at 35%, 65% and 90% for each subsequent 3-month block. Baseline compliance was 22%. Measures taken to improve compliance included email information, grand rounds, ward-level meetings, computer screensavers, nurse support, clinical governance meetings, and face-to-face rapid education. Annotation of AKI within the computer EDL system was progressively enhanced such that in the final quarter the presence of an AKI-alert mandated the user to complete the AKI annotation before the EDL could be signed off.

Results: The completion rate improved to 37% in the second quarter, 51% in the third quarter and 92% in the fourth quarter. This change has been sustained in the 14 months since.

Conclusions: By the end of the study, omissions relating to AKI information were reduced from 78% to less than 10%, indicating our QIP was highly effective-meeting the quality standard. The single most important factor in improving documentation was to mandate user review of AKI aftercare in patients with electronic AKI alerts. Our study encompassed hospital-wide inpatients, and our results could be replicated at other acute hospitals that have implemented an EDL system connected to an AKI alert system.