Development and internal validation of a prediction model for hospital-acquired acute kidney injury

Predictive models and clinical risk scores for hospital-acquired acute kidney injury (AKI) are mainly focused on critical and surgical patients. We have used the electronic clinical records from a tertiary care general hospital to develop a risk score for new-onset AKI in general inpatients that can be estimated automatically from clinical records.

A total of 47 466 patients met inclusion criteria within a 2-year period. Of these, 2385 (5.0%) developed hospital-acquired AKI. Step-wise regression modelling and Bayesian model averaging were used to develop the Madrid Acute Kidney Injury Prediction Score (MAKIPS), which contains 23 variables, all obtainable automatically from electronic clinical records at admission. Bootstrap resampling was employed for internal validation. To optimize calibration, a penalized logistic regression model was estimated by the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (lasso) method of coefficient shrinkage after estimation.

The area under the curve of the receiver operating characteristic curve of the MAKIPS score to predict hospital-acquired AKI at admission was 0.811. Among individual variables, the highest odds ratios, all >2.5, for hospital-acquired AKI were conferred by abdominal, cardiovascular or urological surgery followed by congestive heart failure. An online tool (http://www.bioestadistica.net/MAKIPS.aspx) will facilitate validation in other hospital environments.

MAKIPS is a new risk score to predict the risk of hospital-acquired AKI, based on variables present at admission in the electronic clinical records. This may help to identify patients who require specific monitoring because of a high risk of AKI.