The renal transplant team at Children’s of Alabama has performed more than 500 kidney transplants since 1968. To this day, continuous improvement remains at the heart of everything it does.
The hospital is part of the Improving Renal Outcomes Collaborative (IROC), a learning health system of 32 pediatric kidney transplant centers in the U.S. that share data and best practices in an effort to improve transplant outcomes.
“We know we can achieve better things more efficiently together than if we’re working individually,” said Children’s pediatric nephrologist Michael E. Seifert, M.D.
Improvement Projects
One recent project involved improving blood pressure assessments. “We know that if we control blood pressure we get better patient outcomes and the transplant does better,” Seifert said. Yet an analysis of 17 IROC transplant centers found that blood pressure was being measured appropriately based on current guidelines at just 12% of transplant clinic visits.
Each IROC center had the freedom to design custom tools to fit its needs for improving blood pressure measurement. The answer at Children’s was paper-based tracking logs and regular meetings to review progress. The team also educated all staff on the importance of measuring blood pressure and how to measure it according to the most recent guidelines. “It was pretty simple things that, when applied systematically and consistently, led to prolonged improvement,” Seifert said. Today, at least 85% of clinic visits include an appropriately measured blood pressure and the team is working to improve that number.
The next project is to improve adherence to immunosuppressive drugs, a major risk factor for rejection and loss of the kidney transplant. The team is developing a questionnaire for parents and patients so they can identify the barriers to adherence and develop targeted interventions. “We have to get away from an accusatory approach to a partnership and ask, ‘How can we work with you to make it easier to take your medications?’” Seifert said.
Children’s is also a national leader in studying surveillance biopsies to help reduce acute rejection rates. Most pediatric transplant centers do not perform early surveillance biopsies at pre-specified time points because of their invasive nature, but Seifert and his team demonstrated that surveillance biopsies in the first six months after transplant can detect subclinical inflammation, which is associated with a nearly threefold increased risk of acute rejection and allograft failure. Treating patients who demonstrated such inflammation, they recently reported, significantly reduces that risk. Importantly, they also demonstrated that the surveillance biopsy procedure was safe for pediatric patients, with extremely low rates of mild adverse events.
Bringing the Bench and the Clinic Closer
The transplant team also runs a robust translational research program, with half of transplant patients enrolled in at least one research study. One is a biorepository study in which patients’ blood, urine and kidney biopsy tissue is collected throughout and after the transplant process. “Then we can develop biomarkers of kidney transplant diseases that impact the survival of the transplant,” Seifert said.
The second study will identify determinants of cardiovascular health in pediatric and young adult kidney transplant recipients who have a high burden of cardiovascular risk. “Transplantation improves but doesn’t eliminate this risk,” Seifert said. “This study is
designed to understand certain unique cardiovascular risk factors, such as the impact of
early life stress, on cardiovascular and renal outcomes.”
The Transplant Experts
Learn more about kidney transplantation at Children’s of Alabama.
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