Episode 13: Turning CKD Awareness Into Action With Real-World Data

Andie Cartwright

Welcome to Better Living Through Data. I'm Andie Cartwright, here with Anthony Pero, and since it's National Kidney Month, we wanted to spend some time on chronic kidney disease, or CKD, because it's one of those conditions that affects a huge number of people and still somehow stays... weirdly invisible.

Anthony Pero

Yeah, invisible is the right word. CKD is a major public-health issue in the U.S., affecting millions of Americans, and yet a lot of people don't know they have it. Part of the challenge is that early CKD can be silent. People may feel fine, or mostly fine, while kidney function is already declining.

Andie Cartwright

And that's what makes awareness months like this useful, if we do them well. Not just, you know, a slogan and a ribbon, but real attention to what gets missed. Public-health sources consistently show that CKD is common, especially in older adults, and awareness is still far too low.

Anthony Pero

Exactly. When you look at who is most affected, you see familiar risk groups: older adults, people living with diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. And these aren't isolated buckets. In real care settings, especially post-acute and long-term care, those conditions overlap all the time.

Andie Cartwright

Right. A resident or patient isn't walking in with one tidy diagnosis. It's high blood pressure, heart failure, diabetes, mobility issues, medication burden, maybe a recent hospitalization. CKD can sit in the middle of all that, or underneath it, and not get recognized early enough.

Anthony Pero

And when recognition is delayed, outcomes can worsen. That's especially true for vulnerable populations. People with limited access to preventive care, inconsistent follow-up, transportation barriers, language barriers, or fragmented coverage are more likely to be identified later in the disease course.

Andie Cartwright

I think that's such an important point, because "silent disease" can sound biological only, like the kidneys are being quiet. But sometimes the system is quiet too. The symptoms are subtle, the labs may not get connected over time, and the patient may be moving across care settings where no one has the full picture.

Anthony Pero

That's well said. And for certain communities, including Black and Hispanic populations and people with lower incomes, that silence can be compounded by structural inequities. Delayed identification isn't just unfortunate. It can mean less time for risk reduction, less time for education, and fewer options before the disease progresses.

Andie Cartwright

So as we kick this off for National Kidney Month, I think the frame is pretty simple: CKD is common, often underrecognized, deeply connected to aging and chronic disease, and the burden does not fall evenly.

Anthony Pero

And that uneven burden is exactly why this conversation matters to life sciences, to providers, and to researchers. If we want better outcomes, we have to see CKD earlier, understand it longitudinally, and pay attention to the populations most likely to be overlooked.

Andie Cartwright

Let's stay with that human side for a minute, because it's easy to talk about CKD as a category, but living with it is a very different thing. For many patients, especially older adults, it can show up as fatigue, weakness, shortness of breath, appetite changes, swelling, just a general loss of reserve.

Anthony Pero

Yes, and in aging populations that loss of reserve matters a lot. A small decline in kidney function can interact with everything else that's going on. Maybe someone becomes less able to participate in rehab after a hospitalization. Maybe medication management gets more complicated. Maybe fluid balance becomes harder to maintain. Those changes can affect function, not just lab values.

Andie Cartwright

That's a great distinction. Not just numbers on a chart, but whether someone can get through the day, whether they can recover after an acute event, whether they can stay in a lower-acuity setting safely.

Anthony Pero

And for some patients, progression leads to more frequent hospitalizations, more emergency visits, and eventually decisions around dialysis or transition to higher-acuity care. Those are major life events. They affect the patient, the family, the care team, everybody.

Andie Cartwright

And they're not abstract decisions. They're schedule changes, transportation demands, caregiver stress, financial stress, dietary changes, new medications. Sometimes people hear "dialysis" and think of a treatment pathway. Families hear it and think, how are we going to manage this?

Anthony Pero

That's especially true in underserved populations. If access to nephrology is limited, if primary care is fragmented, if social needs are unmet, the burden of CKD gets heavier. Black and Hispanic communities, lower-income populations, and medically complex patients often face a tougher path through diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment.

Andie Cartwright

And in long-term and post-acute care, you see why earlier recognition matters so much. These patients often have multiple comorbidities and long stays, so there is actually a real opportunity to observe change over time. But if CKD isn't visible in a meaningful way, it can get treated like background noise.

Anthony Pero

Right. Where was I going with this? Oh right—visibility. In these settings, you may have rich clinical touchpoints, but the patient journey is still complex. One person might move from hospital to skilled nursing to long-term care, then back to the hospital. Without longitudinal visibility, important signals get lost.

Andie Cartwright

And that's where I think the day-to-day realities matter. In post-acute care, staff are seeing blood pressure, weight, function, symptoms, medication changes. Those are clues. For medically complex residents, earlier recognition of kidney decline can shape care planning before things become urgent.

Anthony Pero

Absolutely. Better visibility can support better conversations too—about progression, about quality of life, about goals of care, and about interventions that may help preserve function longer. Because with CKD, timing matters. A lot.

Andie Cartwright

So let's talk about the data side, because this is Better Living Through Data after all. Awareness is important, but if it doesn't lead to action, it kind of stalls out. And this is where real-world data becomes incredibly valuable.

Anthony Pero

It does. Especially for CKD, because this is a longitudinal disease. You need to understand progression over time, across care settings, and in the context of comorbidities. That's why the CKD brochure from PointClickCare Life Sciences is so relevant here. It describes a regulatory-grade, specially curated CKD data collection built for research across different stakeholder needs.

Andie Cartwright

And the scale is notable. The brochure highlights 4.1 million unique patient records with CKD and more than 300,000 active unique CKD patient records. That's significant, particularly when you're trying to study treatment patterns and outcomes in real-world populations rather than idealized trial populations.

Anthony Pero

Exactly. And it's not just scale for the sake of scale. The dataset includes measures that matter for actual CKD research and decision-making: utilization, hospitalizations, emergency department visits, length of stay, time to dialysis, modality choice, kidney function measures like eGFR, serum creatinine, and urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio.

Andie Cartwright

It also spans comorbidities, observations, and even quality-of-life-related measures—fatigue, shortness of breath, frailty indicators, functional status, cognitive performance. I like that because it reflects what we were just talking about. CKD isn't only a kidney story. It's a whole-person story.

Anthony Pero

That's right. The brochure also points to treatment patterns, including use of ACE inhibitors, SGLT2 inhibitors, statins, mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists, GLP-1 receptor agonists, and dosage information. For life sciences teams, that opens the door to understanding how therapies are used in practice, not just how they perform in controlled environments.

Andie Cartwright

And because PointClickCare Life Sciences focuses on long-term and post-acute care, there's an important context layer here. The brochure notes electronic health records capturing, on average, more than 50 points per patient day, across more than 10 million patients aged 65 and older, over 10-plus years, with average long stays over 800 days. That kind of longitudinal depth can help reveal patterns you just can't see in shorter snapshots.

Anthony Pero

For researchers, that means better risk stratification, stronger outcome measurement, and more insight into progression in aging and medically complex populations. For care stakeholders, it can support earlier identification of patients at risk of decline. And for life sciences organizations, it helps connect evidence generation with unmet need in the real world.

Andie Cartwright

So maybe that's the takeaway for National Kidney Month: awareness is the starting point, but better data is what helps you act earlier, ask smarter questions, and make more informed decisions for patients who are too often overlooked.

Anthony Pero

Well said. Andie, this was a good one—important, timely, and honestly a reminder that data is most useful when it helps us see people more clearly.

Andie Cartwright

Agreed. Thanks, Anthony. And thanks to everyone for listening to Better Living Through Data. We'll be back soon with more conversations at the intersection of healthcare, research, and real-world insight. Bye for now.

Anthony Pero

Take care, Andie. Talk soon, everyone.