Intensive care medicine
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Intensive care medicine · Aug 2015
Multicenter StudyEpidemiology of acute kidney injury in critically ill patients: the multinational AKI-EPI study.
Current reports on acute kidney injury (AKI) in the intensive care unit (ICU) show wide variation in occurrence rate and are limited by study biases such as use of incomplete AKI definition, selected cohorts, or retrospective design. Our aim was to prospectively investigate the occurrence and outcomes of AKI in ICU patients. ⋯ This is the first multinational cross-sectional study on the epidemiology of AKI in ICU patients using the complete KDIGO criteria. We found that AKI occurred in more than half of ICU patients. Increasing AKI severity was associated with increased mortality, and AKI patients had worse renal function at the time of hospital discharge. Adjusted risks for AKI and mortality were similar across different continents and regions.
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Intensive care medicine · Aug 2015
Multicenter StudyCost awareness of physicians in intensive care units: a multicentric national study.
Physicians play an important role in strategies to control health care spending. Being aware of the cost of prescriptions is surely the first step to incorporating cost-consciousness into medical practice. The aim of this study was to evaluate current intensivists' knowledge of the costs of common prescriptions and to identify factors influencing the accuracy of cost estimations. ⋯ ICU physicians have a poor awareness of prescriptions costs, especially with regards to high-cost drugs. Considerable emphasis and effort are still required to integrate the cost-containment problem into the daily prescriptions in ICUs.