The unique collaborative designed to share information and improve the health of children who have kidney transplants grew this year to include 23 centers nationwide.

The Improving Renal Outcomes Collaborative (IROC), started in 2016, now represents nearly 40 percent of all children in the United States who have had a kidney transplant. This year, IROC has worked on making structured quality improvement activities at each center.

“We have built a registry of data on outcomes and outcomes improvement activities at each participating center,” says David Hooper, MD, MS, medical director of the Kidney Transplant Program at Cincinnati Children’s. “We’ve made improvements in our program in Cincinnati and we’re teaching other centers to do the same. We are also learning from them as they share their improvements with us.”

The ability to pool clinical data on patients’ care and outcomes is a primary goal of the collaborative. Sharing that data will help standardize healthcare delivery so that best practices are implemented reliably in clinical practice across the United States.

One example is standardizing blood pressure measurement across the centers. The goal is to measure patients’ blood pressure according to evidence-based guidelines at every clinic visit, but practice has varied. Among the IROC sites participating in improving blood pressure monitoring, Hooper says, now over 90 percent of patients are having blood pressure measured correctly at each clinic visit.

Going forward, IROC plans to focus on achieving better control of patients’ blood pressure, decreasing acute rejection episodes and improving patients’ quality of life.

As patients receive transplants at a younger age and live longer, focusing on quality improvement is ever more important, Hooper says.

“That’s why we are focusing on improving long-term outcomes. Patients are expecting to live a long life, so it makes sense.”