Improving awareness of kidney function through electronic urine output monitoring: a comparative study

BACKGROUND: The current classification for acute kidney injury (AKI) according to the Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) criteria integrates both serum creatinine (SCr) and urine output (UO). Most reports on AKI claim to use KDIGO guidelines but fail to include the UO criterion. It has been shown that patients who had intensive UO monitoring, with or without AKI, had significantly less cumulative fluid volume and fluid overload, reduced vasopressor use, and improved 30-day mortality. We examined whether real-time monitoring of this simple, sensitive, and easy-to-use biomarker in the ICU led to more appropriate intervention by healthcare providers and better outcomes. METHODS: RenalSense Clarity RMS Consoles were installed in the General ICU at the Hadassah Medical Center, Israel, from December 2019 to November 2020. The Clarity RMS system continuously and electronically monitors UO in real-time. 100 patients were randomly selected from this period as the study group (UO(elec)) and compared to a matched control group (UO(manual)) from the same period two years earlier. To test whether there was an association between oliguric hours and fluid treatment in each group, the correlation was calculated and analyzed for each of the different UO monitoring methods. RESULTS: Therapeutic intervention: The correlation of the sum of all oliguric hours on Day 1 and 2 with the sum of any therapeutic intervention (fluid bolus or furosemide) showed a significant correlation for the study group UO(elec) (P = 0.017). The matched control group UO(manual) showed no such correlation (P = 0.932). Length of Stay (LOS): Median LOS [IQR] in the ICU of UO(elec) versus UO(manual) was 69.46 [44.7, 125.9] hours and 116.5 [62.46, 281.3] hours, respectively (P = 0.0002). CONCLUSIONS: The results of our study strongly suggest that ICU patients had more meaningful and better medical intervention, and improved outcomes, with electronic UO monitoring than with manual monitoring. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12882-022-03046-5.