Minneapolis, MN and Cincinnati, OH, Nov. 29, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- VigiLanz and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center today announced a collaboration that leverages Cincinnati Children’s ground-breaking research on pediatric nephrotoxic kidney injury and VigiLanz’s capabilities to commercialize a solution for Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) in pediatric patients. Dubbed NINJA, or Nephrotoxic Injury Negated by Just-in-time Action, the solution enables real-time identification and monitoring of patients at risk for AKI due to exposure to nephrotoxic drugs.
“Pediatric acute kidney injury is a serious problem that traditionally could not be identified in real-time, which impacted our ability to identify the patients who most needed treatment,” stated Dr. Stuart L. Goldstein, MD, FAAP, FNKF, Director of the Center for Acute Care Nephrology and primary researcher on NINJA. “By partnering with VigiLanz, Cincinnati Children’s is applying our unprecedented research to a commercially-available solution that accurately characterizes pediatric AKI epidemiology, reducing AKI and improving patient outcomes.”
Commercially available to hospitals and health systems focused on mitigating pediatric AKI, NINJA automates a time-consuming manual screening process that includes evaluating patients for exposure to 57 nephrotoxic medications, imaging contrast dye, and recent renal testing. For medications, manual screening is limited to the last 24 hours, while the contrast dye evaluation requires reviewing records for the previous seven days to determine if it was received by the patient.
Leveraging NINJA algorithms built into VigiLanz rules, an AKI monitoring dashboard lists all patients that meet the NINJA exposure criteria as well as the criteria that put the patient in the at-risk category. These criteria include medication exposure, serum creatinine data, and patient history of AKI. When patients meet at-risk criteria, they are placed on the monitoring list in real time, where they remain until 48 hours after their risk has passed.
The platform also features metric outputs that can be customized with respect to service lines and time periods, while robust reporting tools provide the ability to trend conditions over time via automated run charts. It also enables automatic and customizable data extraction for all metric elements, including inpatient census by location or service line.
“By expanding awareness of the extensive research conducted by Cincinnati Children’s, this partnership will help drive improvements in pediatric AKI outcomes,” said VigiLanz Chairman and CEO Dr. David Goldsteen, MD, MBA. “Those improvements can be realized quickly, too, as the NINJA dashboard is not just a concept but rather a tangible solution now available to any hospital interested in limiting AKI associated with nephrotoxic drugs.”
About VigiLanz
Founded in 2001, VigiLanz Corporation (www.vigilanzcorp.com) is a privately held, rapidly growing provider of SaaS health care intelligence and predictive analytics. The firm is focused on aggregating disparate EHR transactional workflow and documentation data across health systems to identify real-time clinical issues that avoid or minimize harm, optimize clinical outcomes and support preventive care along the entire health system continuum. VigiLanz supports a large and growing community of hospital CMOs, CMIOs, CIOs, quality teams, infectious disease and control specialists, pharmacists, and other clinicians dedicated to real-time inpatient and outpatient care. VigiLanz is shaping the emerging era of real-time health care by delivering enterprise intelligence technology and services that improve clinical outcomes, patient care and operational effectiveness.