Background: Most of the patients with end-stage kidney failure are treated with dialysis. Jurisdictions around the world are actively promoting peritoneal dialysis (PD) because it is equivalent to hemodialysis in terms of clinical outcomes, but is less costly. Unfortunately, PD penetration remains low. Objectives: The Starting dialysis on Time, At Home, on the Right Therapy (START) Project had 2 overarching goals: (1) to provide information that would help programs increase the safe and effective use of PD, and (2) to reduce inappropriate, early initiation of dialysis in patients with kidney failure. In this article, we focus on the first objective and describe the rationale for START and the methods employed. Design: The START Project was a comprehensive, province-wide quality improvement intervention. Setting: The START project was implemented in both Alberta Kidney Care (AKC)-South and AKC-North, including all 7 renal programs in the province. Patients: The project included all patients who commenced maintenance dialysis between October 1, 2015, and March 31, 2018, in Alberta, Canada who met our inclusion criteria. Measurements: We reported baseline characteristics of incident dialysis patients overall, and by site. Our key performance indicator was the proportion of patients who received PD for any period of time within 180 days of the first dialysis treatment. Reports also included detailed metrics pertaining to the 6 steps in the process of modality selection and we had the capacity to provide more granular data on an as-needed basis. To understand loss of PD patients, we reported the numbers of incident patients who recovered kidney function, experienced technique failure, received a transplant, were lost to follow-up, transferred to another program, or died. Methods: START provided dialysis programs with a conceptual framework for understanding the drivers of PD utilization. High-quality, detailed data were collected using a tool that was custom-built for this purpose, and were mapped to steps in the process of care that drove the outcomes of interest. This allowed sites to identify gaps in care, develop action plans, and implement local interventions to address them. The process was supported by an Innovation Learning Collaborative consisting of 3 learning sessions that brought frontline staff together from across the province to share strategies and learnings. Ongoing data collection allowed teams to determine whether their interventions were effective at each subsequent learning session, and to revisit their interventions if required (the “Plan-Do-Study-Act Cycle”). Results: Future work will report on the impact of the START project on incident PD utilization at a provincial and regional level. Limitations: The time required to design and implement interventions in practice, as well as the need for multiple PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) cycles to see results, meant that the true potential may not be realized during a relatively short intervention period. Change required buy-in and support from local and provincial leadership and frontline staff. In the absence of accountability for local performance, we relied on the goodwill of participating programs to use the information and resources provided to effect change. Finally, the burden of documentation and data collection for frontline staff was high at baseline. We anticipated that adding supplemental data collection would be difficult. Conclusions: The START project was a comprehensive, province-wide initiative to maximize the safe and effective use of PD in Alberta, Canada. It standardized the management of incident dialysis patients, leveraged high-quality data to facilitate the reporting of metrics mapped to steps in the process of care that drove incident PD utilization, and helped programs to identify gaps in care and target them for improvement. Future work will report on the impact of the program on incident utilization at the provincial and regional level.
Integrated Pathology Informatics Enables High-Quality Personalized and Precision Medicine: Digital Pathology and Beyond