(New York City, NY) – October 28, 2025 – The National Kidney Foundation (NKF) Pharmacy Workgroup was recently recognized with the 2025 ACCP Ambulatory Care Practice and Research Network (PRN) Outstanding Paper of the Year Award for their paper, “Moving forward from Cockcroft-Gault creatinine clearance to race-free estimated glomerular filtration rate to improve medication-related decision-making in adults across healthcare settings: A consensus of the National Kidney Foundation Workgroup for Implementation of Race-Free eGFR-Based Medication-Related Decisions,” which was published in the American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy. Workgroup co-chairs, Wendy St. Peter, PharmD, FNKF, FASN, FCCP of the University of Minnesota, College of Pharmacy and Andrew S. Bzowyckyj, PharmD, BCPS, CDCES of the National Kidney Foundation, accepted the award on behalf of Workgroup members.
“This award underscores the importance of advancing unified kidney health testing so that people living with kidney diseases and clinicians view the same eGFR kidney function test on the laboratory report as the pharmacist uses to guide medication counseling," said Joseph Vassalotti, MD, Chief Medical Officer of the National Kidney Foundation. "We encourage clinicians, pharmacists, and healthcare organizations to join NKF in driving this transition to adopt uniform, race-free, kidney function testing", concluded Dr. Vassalotti.
“This recognition also illustrates that the pharmacy community is starting to align with the transition from the Cockcroft-Gault eCrCL formula to the recommended CKD-EPI eGFR race-free equations for medication-related decisions,” said Wendy St. Peter.
Important factors continue to drive this change. In 2024 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued guidance for industry recommending use of eGFR over Cockcroft-Gault eCrCL to evaluate the impact on pharmacokinetics in patients with impaired kidney function in clinical trials. Pharmacokinetic studies of new medications have increasingly employed eGFR to evaluate kidney function which has given rise to an increasing number of product label dosing recommendations based on eGFR rather than Cockcroft-Gault eCrCL. There is also evidence that demonstrates eGFR adjusted for an individual’s body surface area better predicts clearance of several older medications compared to Cockcroft-Gault eCrCL.
The NKF continues to collaborate with leadership from professional pharmacy organizations and clinical laboratories as well as other stakeholders to advance necessary practice transformation for this important change.
About Kidney Disease
In the United States, 37 million adults are estimated to have kidney disease - also known as chronic kidney disease (CKD) - and approximately 90 percent don't know they have it. About 1 in 3 adults in the U.S. are at risk for kidney disease. Risk factors for kidney disease include diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, and family history. People of Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian American, or Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander descent are at increased risk for developing the disease. Black or African American people are about four times as likely as White people to have kidney failure. Hispanic people experience kidney failure at about double the rate of White people.
About the National Kidney Foundation
The National Kidney Foundation is revolutionizing the fight to save lives by eliminating preventable kidney disease, accelerating innovation for the dignity of the patient experience, and dismantling structural inequities in kidney care, dialysis, and transplantation. For more information about NKF, visit www.kidney.org.
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Sam Tyler
National Kidney Foundation
Phone: (212) 889-2210 x 141
Email: sam.tyler@kidney.org