[Development of methods to evaluate nephrological screening and support measures, and lessons learned from the...

Throughout the world, the incidence and prevalence of patients with chronic kidney disease have been steadily rising. In 2016, the Styrian nephrology awareness program "niere.schützen" ("Kidney Protection") was launched to early identify patients with renal insufficiency. The aim of this study was to search for existing international nephrological screening and support programs in order to identify possible evaluation parameters and concepts for niere.schützen. A search in MEDLINE® revealed five relevant international programs from four countries. These differed from one another with respect to the population to be screened, the screening method and the support measures. All the programs involved the transparent documentation of patient data, and allowed for disease monitoring, as well as the impact of specific measures on assessed parameters and variables (laboratory data, participation rates) to be determined. Depending on the data sources employed and the availability and comprehensiveness of additional documentation, three evaluation methods of different informative value were developed. The first method requires no participant labelling, while the second and third methods require the participants to be assigned to a particular program. With the third method, the documentation also needs to be conducted in line with a disease management program. Considering that the speedy implementation of the niere.schützen program is desired for political reasons, the only practical method is the first one as it does not entail patient documentation and only involves the evaluation of process parameters.