University of Southampton

ILD101

Patients on kidney replacement therapy (KRT) are multi-morbid and many start KRT with a primary kidney diagnosis of diabetes and cardiovascular disease with various medications prescribed. About 60% of patients on KRT received a transplant by the end of 2019 and use different types of immunosuppression medication and different dosages. Understanding the medication profile for patients on different treatment modalities (haemodialysis, peritoneal dialysis and transplantation), age groups and primary kidney diagnosis is very important in identifying differences in care and understanding outcomes for these patients. Currently, the UKRR is unable to include medication data in all but a handful of analyses. The majority of the data on medications comes in as free text, both generic and brand names of drugs are used and there is no consistent method of reporting the name, dose, route or frequency. There are also a relatively high number of spelling mistakes in free text submissions. Work done in this project will hopefully result in a code that will identify and correct misspelt names and to separate long strings of data, which include medication, dose, frequency and route. The UKRR will be able to describe medications data in patients with CKD for the first time and explore unwanted variation in treatment between kidney centres.

25/05/2021