Removing Barriers to CKD Testing

Sonora Quest Laboratories have partnered with the National Kidney Foundation and the American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP) to help overcome routine obstacles observed in chronic kidney disease (CKD) and improve primary care diagnosis. 

Sonora Quest Laboratories is Arizona’s leading provider of diagnostic testing and information services.  As a joint venture between Banner Health and Quest Diagnostics, they are now part of the national largest integrated laboratory system with 3,200 employees serving more than 22,000 patients and holding the position as the market share leader in clinical laboratory testing in Arizona.  The ASCP is a medical professional society with more than 100,000 board-certified anatomic and clinical pathologists, pathology residents and fellows, laboratory professionals and students.  With these two working alongside the National Kidney Foundation, the largest, most comprehensive and longstanding organization dedicated to the awareness, prevention and treatment of kidney disease, they are striving to remove barriers for CKD testing.

Their goals include standardizing the tests used to detect the kidney disease, improving comparison of test results between laboratories, increasing early recognition of the disease and promoting patient awareness of the condition in the Arizona market.  Almost 75 million people are at rick while approximately 30 million have CKD.  Unfortunately due to the minimal symptoms that occur with the early stages of kidney disease, only about 3.6 million are currently aware that they have the disease. 

94% of patients with high blood pressure and 61% of patients with diabetes may not be receiving both tests necessary in order to detect and monitor kidney disease.  Despite these being the top two risk factors of developing CKD and recommendations from clinical practice guidelines, we still see many of these individuals reaching the end stages of their disease before being treated. This collaboration has allowed for a new test profile for CKD assessment and diagnosis which is now available through Sonora Quest Laboratories.  This follows evidence-based clinical practice guidelines recommendations of the two tests for CKD assessment – the estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), which assesses kidney function, and urine albumin-creatinine ratio (ACD), which assesses kidney damage.  This profile allows for the simplification of ordering tests needed to detect and diagnose CKD by pairing them together and streamlining the test ordering.