Optimizing Dietary Habits for Kidney Stone Formers Using Telehealth Directed Individualized Nutritional Counseling

Urolithiasis affects 1 in 11 Americans and is associated with annual health care expenditures of up to $4.5 billion. Fifty percent of stone risk can be attributed to diet and fluid intake. Modifications in sodium intake can dramatically reduce risk of kidney stone disease as determined by 24-hour urine results. Despite this understanding, dietary counseling is largely ineffective as kidney stone formers have difficulty adhering to low sodium diets. The precise reasons behind this are unknown, but it is hypothesized that socioeconomic factors such as low income and low education contribute to a lack of knowledge of, and access to, healthy alternatives to salty foods. The relationship between lithogenic diet consumption and stone disease requires a more in depth understanding of patients' home food environments, dietary habits, and perceived barriers to following a low-sodium diet. This understanding will help direct appropriate interventions to prevent recurrent stones.

Routine historic face-to-face clinic visits rapidly have been replaced with telehealth encounters with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Such changes will likely remain the standard of care and will define the new "normal" for some time. This presents an opportunity to integrate robust information now available through the exponential growth of video visits with directed dietary counseling. Through video exchange with patients in their homes an abundance of previously untapped information is immediately available to healthcare providers. Smartphone video capabilities are available to most stone patients irrespective of their financial status. Images from telehealth video visits, including patient lifestyle, behaviors, resources, and home environment will give objective data as to types of food consumed regularly by patients and their capacity to prepare healthy foods at home.

The following specific aims are proposed: 1) Assess which data from video visits are most informative for identifying how to counsel patients to reduce patient sodium intake, and 2) Administer virtual home visit-informed individualized dietary counseling to stone formers and compare this to survey-informed dietary counseling. 24-hour urinary sodium results and patient dietary sodium knowledge and perceptions will be monitored over 6 months. This study will leverage the rapid growth of telehealth medical visits as a consequence of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic to better understand and improve food consumption behavior of recurrent stone formers.