Telemedicine to Promote Patient Safety: Use of Phone-Based Interactive Voice-Response System to Reduce Adverse Safety Events in Pre-dialysis CKD

CKD patients have several features conferring on them a high risk of adverse safety events, which are defined as incidents with unintended harm related to processes of care or medications. These characteristics include impaired kidney function, polypharmacy, and frequent health system encounters. The consequences of such events in CKD can include new or prolonged hospitalization, accelerated kidney function loss, acute kidney injury, ESRD, and death. Health information technology administered via telemedicine presents opportunities for CKD patients to remotely communicate safety-related findings to providers for the purpose of improving their care. However, many CKD patients have limitations that hinder their use of telemedicine and access to the broad capabilities of health information technology. In this review, we summarize previous assessments of the pre-dialysis CKD populations' proficiency in using telemedicine modalities and describe the use of interactive voice-response system to gauge the safety phenotype of the CKD patient. We discuss the potential for expanded interactive voice-response system use in CKD to address the safety threats inherent to this population.