App to help spot acute kidney injury had no clinical benefits, study finds

An alerting tool developed in cooperation with the Google company DeepMind to speed up the diagnosis of acute kidney injury has shown no clinical benefits when it was compared with normal care, a team from University College London and the Royal Free Hospital has concluded.

Although the system worked as intended and led to earlier recognition of the reduced kidney function characteristic of AKI in patients admitted through the hospital’s emergency department, it did not lead to any improvements in the primary outcome measure (renal recovery) or in secondary outcomes, which included survival, length of stay in hospital, and admission to the intensive care unit.

Results from patients who developed AKI during their hospital stay have also been collected but were not included in this study, published in Nature Digital Medicine.1 Unless results are more encouraging, the study will be a serious …