Over the past decade, direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs) have contributed to a major paradigm shift in thrombosis management, replacing vitamin K antagonists as the most commonly prescribed anticoagulants in many countries. While DOACs provide distinct advantages over warfarin (eg, convenience, simplicity, and safety), they are frequently associated with inappropriate prescribing and adverse events. These events have prompted regulatory agencies to mandate oversight, which individual institutions may find difficult to comply with given limited resources. Veterans Health Administration (VHA) has leveraged technology to develop the DOAC Population Management Tool (PMT) to address these challenges. This tool has empowered VHA to update a 60‐year standard of care from one‐to‐one provider‐to‐patient anticoagulation monitoring to a population‐based management approach. The DOAC PMT allows for the oversight of all patients prescribed DOACs and leads to intervention only when clinically indicated. Using the DOAC PMT, facilities across VHA have maximized DOAC oversight while minimizing resource usage. Herein, we discuss how the DOAC PMT was conceived, developed, and implemented, along with the challenges encountered throughout the process. Additionally, we share the impact of the DOAC PMT across VHA, and the potential of this approach beyond anticoagulation and VHA.
Purpose
The poor performance of current tests for predicting the onset, progression and treatment response of diabetic nephropathy has engendered a search for more sensitive and specific urinary biomarkers. Our goal was to develop a new method for protein biomarker discovery in urine from these patients.
Experimental Design
We analyzed urine from normal subjects and patients with early and advanced nephropathy. Proteins were separated using a novel analysis process including immunodepletion of high abundance proteins followed by two stage LC fractionation of low abundance proteins. The proteins in the fractions were sequenced using MS/MS.
Results
Immunodepletion of selected high abundance proteins followed by two stage LC produced approximately 700 fractions, each less complex and more amenable to analysis than the mixture and requiring minimal processing for MS identification. Comparison of fractions between normal and diabetic nephropathy subjects revealed several low abundance proteins that reproducibly distinguished low glomerular filtration rate (GFR) from both high GFR diabetic and normal subjects, including uteroglobin, a protein previously associated with renal scarring.
Conclusions and clinical relevance
We developed a novel method to identify low abundance urinary proteins that enables the discovery of potential biomarkers to improve the diagnosis and management of patients with diabetic nephropathy.
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