The barometer for chronic kidney disease (CKD) has been developed as a tool to improve the quality of primary care for CKD. This tool provides general practitioners with interactive insights into their care strategies at the practice level by using automatic audit and feedback, based on the data available in the electronic medical record (EMR) of the practice.
With the insights from the feedback report, general practitioners can formulate targeted care plans to optimize care for CKD patients. Both the follow-up queries and the queries used to generate the feedback are available in the GP's EMR. This allows the GP to check which CKD patients, for example, have not received an eGFR value determination in the past year, invite these patients for a check-up, or place relevant comments in their medical record.
Overview of quality indicators
In addition to the prevalence of coded CKD and CKD according to laboratory results in the practice, several more specific CKD indicators, such as testing the eGFR value, are displayed in the feedback report. The indicators are fully automatically extractable from the EMR and based on scientific research.
Since CKD is a chronic condition, this barometer, like the diabetes barometer, focuses exclusively on patients for whom the practice is the GMD holder. To enable automatic data extraction, only correctly registered diagnoses, laboratory results, and actions are considered.
This barometer was developed with support from the RIZIV.
Timing
The automated data collection for the CKD barometer is done semi-annually.
Publication
Van Den Bulck SA, Vankrunkelsven P, Goderis G, Van Pottelbergh G, Swerts J, Panis K, et al. Developing quality indicators for Chronic Kidney Disease in primary care, extractable from the Electronic Medical Record. A Rand-modified Delphi method. BMC Nephrol. 2020 Dec;21(1):161.