New Home Test for Kidney Damage Shows Promising Results

Geisinger has partnered with the National Kidney Foundation and Healthy.io to bring you an at-home test to determine your kidney health.  Geisinger is one of the nation’s most innovative health services, serving more than 1.5 million patients in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  With their extensive system including 13 hospital campuses, nearly 600,000 member health plan, two research centers and the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine, they are committed to improving care, and test and to share innovation that works. 

Healthy.io has created a smartphone-based urinalysis test to improve detection of albuminuria.  Albuminuria being a type of protein that is normally found in the blood and should therefore, not exist in your urine.  If kidneys are damaged, the protein can leak out of the kidneys and into your urine.  In order to determine the accuracy of the at-home test, they randomized 999 non-diabetic patients with hypertension who had never completed a screening for kidney disease.  These patients were then randomized into two groups; one for usual care and one for the home test.  All patients were then sent an education letter and electronic lab order for urinalysis to be done at a Geisinger lab.  Patients were followed-up with over a three-month period to see if they had completed the screening.

Nearly everyone in the focus group for the at-home test tried it and a high percentage were happy with the process and preferred it over getting tested at a doctor’s office.  98% attempted the test and succeeded and 89% said that they preferred it over a test at a physician’s office.  The mean score of all participants who tried the smartphone urinalysis test and would recommend it to others was 8.9/10.  FDA has approved smartphone-based urinalysis test kits for at-home use that matches the quality of clinical laboratory tests.  The flood of new diagnostic technologies undergoing research and moving toward regulatory approval should motivate medical laboratory managers and clinical pathologists to rethink their lab’s business and clinical strategies. Early prevention can slow the progression of kidney disease, which can essentially become deadly if not caught early enough.  Unfortunately, less than 10% of patients with hypertension and 40% of patients with diabetes have been screened for kidney disease.  About 30 million American adults are affected by CKD, but nearly 90 percent don’t know they have this life-threatening illness.  The investigators concluded that use of the mailed, smartphone kits may offer an additional modality to improve compliance with albuminuria screening and could be preferable to some patients.