A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that using an electronic health record-based algorithm did not result in reduced hospitalization for patients with chronic kidney disease, type 2 diabetes, and hypertension. The research was conducted by Miguel A. Vazquez, M.D., and colleagues from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
The study involved 11,182 patients treated at 141 primary care clinics. Patients were randomly assigned to either receive an intervention using a personalized algorithm or to receive usual care. Seventy-one practices with 5,690 patients were assigned to the intervention group, while 70 practices with 5,492 patients were assigned to the usual care group.
After one year, the hospitalization rate was 20.7% in the intervention group and 21.1% in the usual care group. Both groups had similar risks for emergency department visits, readmissions, cardiovascular events, dialysis, or death from any cause. The only difference was that acute kidney injury occurred more frequently in the intervention group.
Despite these findings, the authors concluded that at one year there was no better disease control or reduced hospitalization with the intervention compared to usual care. The study was conducted as an open-label cluster-randomized trial and its results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. For more information on this interesting research, readers can refer to the journal article by Miguel A. Vazquez et al.[/
