It can take years—decades even—for evidence-based guideline recommendations to become part of routine clinical care. Despite the recent surge of positive results for various interventions in randomized trials for patients with kidney disease, adherence to guideline-based care remains disappointingly low. Even longstanding guideline recommendations, such as albuminuria testing in high-risk patients and initiation and persistence of nephroprotective therapies, are inconsistently followed internationally. Research from the past two decades has shown that challenges of implementing guidelines into routine care are multifold. Achieving optimal uptake of guidelines and thus translation of evidence into clinical practice requires a concerted effort to target these barriers across all levels.

The goal of the KDIGO Controversies Conference on Technological Advancements to Support Guideline-Informed Care was to characterize the nature of these implementation challenges and propose ways to overcome them, with a specific focus on opportunities to use technology to enhance the implementation of evidence-based care. Participants included various stakeholders and specialty groups beyond nephrology, including implementation/behavioral scientists, hospital administrators/care providers, electronic health record (EHR) developers, other IT stakeholders, healthcare policy specialists, primary care physicians, cardiologists, etc. It is envisaged that these stakeholders will work locally and collaboratively to address regional issues related to guideline care translation.

Dr. Alan Go (Kaiser Permanente, United States) and Dr. Jo-Anne Manski-Nankervis (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) co-chaired this conference.