Online resources for chronic kidney disease (CKD) for primary care.

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) has joined a list of other financially-incentivised quality indicators for UK general practice contained within the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF). The QOF CKD indicators expect practices to identify people with CKD and to control their blood pressure, ideally using angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors or angiotensin II receptor blockers. To help practices achieve the targets measured with the indicators, the Primary Care Informatics group at St George’s have created online resources. These consist of an online calculator to allow glomerular filtration rate (GFR) to be estimated for individual patients and a spreadsheet to allow multiple simultaneous estimation of GFR. The calculator is also available in a downloadable format to allow it to be used on computers not connected to the internet or with slow connections. The calculator requires the patient’s age, gender, serum creatinine and race (if black; Figure 1). The pilot resources are available at: www.pcel.info/ gfr/ for the online calculator and www.pcel.info/ckd/ for other CKD resources. The CKD resources include access to the renal National Service Framework (NSF) guidelines, scientific papers and other resources. Each resource has an index card providing further information. The calculators have been designed to work with standard UK units and will not accept out-of-range values (types of data entry error are flagged up in the spreadsheet). This brief article provides further background to CKD describes the research we have carried out, discusses the challenge ofmanaging CKD and sets out how we might like to see CKD indicators and targets extended in the future. The resources include the following calculators described in more detail in Box 1: