NKF Spring Clinical Meetings will cover health equity, cardiorenal issues, home dialysis
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For the first time in 2 years, the National Kidney Foundation Spring Clinical Meetings will take place live, organizers report. Tara I. Chang, MD, MS, said attendees are looking forward to the change.
“I think many people are ready; we all miss that in-person interaction,” Chang, the 2022 Spring Clinical Meetings (SCM22) conference chair and division chief and associate professor of medicine in the division of nephrology at Stanford University, told Nephrology News & Issues. “Networking isn’t something you can replicate on Zoom.”
SCM22 will take place April 6-10 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston and the program will be offered live as well as online; some sessions will be unique to those attending remotely, the NKF said.
For those attending live, proof of vaccination will be required to enter the conference center, and vaccinations must have been completed by March 18 to attend the meeting.
Program highlights
The annual NKF meeting is unique in offering programming to all members of the kidney care team: nephrologists, general internists, pharmacists, physician assistants, nurses, renal dietitians, social workers, administrators and patients, covering the latest insights into caring for patients with kidney disease.
“The meeting doesn’t have an overall theme, primarily because the content is so diverse,” Chang said. “We did make clear from the outset that we wanted to be thoughtful and deliberate about including sessions on diversity and inclusion, not only in terms of topics but also who the speakers are.”
The SCM22 keynote speaker is David R. Williams, MD, the Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health and chair of the department of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His session will be on understanding and addressing inequities in health and will take place on Thursday, April 7.
Chang said the issue of diversity and inclusion is addressed in all the specialty programs. “There is a session, for example, on avoiding bias when developing dietary recommendations for kidney patients,” Chang said. “It’s great that all disciplines are recognizing the importance of this issue and calling it out. These are problems that we know have been around for decades.”
Other sessions of interest will cover home dialysis and how the new CMS-directed payment models – the ESRD Treatment Choices model and the Kidney Care Choices model, both launched in the past year – have the potential for increasing the home dialysis population, Chang said. Other sessions highlighted by the NKF across all disciplines include a panel discussion on how to resolve dilemmas when clinical practice guidelines do not always support patient-centered care; the application of precision medicine in reducing the risk of kidney toxicity; and a session on how proteinuria influences risk assessment for chronic kidney disease.
Cardiorenal connection
Chang, who has a special interest in the connection between cardiovascular and kidney disease, highlighted a session on Saturday, April 9, called “Getting to the heart of kidney disease.”
“You read the scientific papers covering these new therapies for CKD, but it is important to know how you implement a lot of these treatments. What do you do first? Do you maximize the [angiotensin receptor blockers] and SGLT2s? ...[W]hat about other heart failure therapies? Will they show a benefit?” Chang said.
“What we need is the implementation piece. How do we translate it from the journal paper into my practice? This session will look at the new drug therapies for CKD standard of care for cardiac disease, the standard of care for kidney disease and how they intersect.”
For more information on SCM22 and to register for the meeting, visit www.kidney.org/spring-clinical.
- For more information:
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Tara I. Chang, MD, MS,
can be reached at tichang@stanford.edu.
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