What is NephMadness?

NephMadness is an homage to the NCAA Basketball Tournament, March Madness, but while the basketball tournament seeds the top ranked basketball teams, we use some of the most important, newest, and controversial concepts in nephrology. This is not nephrology 101, You won’t find hypokalemia, loop of Henle, or Winter’s formula here. We expect that some of the concepts will be novel, even to academically minded nephrologists, so we provide deep, fully referenced, guides to each of the concepts. Please make sure you explore the entire field of 64 concepts which are divided into 8 regions. Each region is a bespoke collection of the finest topics curated by world-renowned experts:

1. Obstetric Nephrology: Phyllis August, MD
2. Infectious Disease and Nephrology: Samir Gupta, MD
3. The Heart and Kidney Connection: Andrew A. House, MD
4. Nephrology and Nutrition: Allon Friedman, MD
5. Genetic Nephrology: Conall O’Seaghdha, MD
6. Critical Care Nephrology: Lakhmir Chawla, MD
7. Nephrology and Vascular Surgery: Timmy Lee, MD
8. Onconephrology: Mitch Rosner, MD

Click to download a PDF of the brackets

How do I participate in NephMadness?

Anyone can participate in NephMadness by predicting the outcomes of each head-to-head match up. This is called filling out your brackets. Once you are familiar with the field, go to the NephMadness Bracket Submission Site and make your predictions. You will need to register with an e-mail address and a user name. We also ask a few other questions, just so we have an idea of who the players are. These are optional. We think best part of NephMadness is when people take to social media to cheer their teams on. If you have a blog, write about your choices, if you are on Twitter, use #NephMadness to tweet about the game. Take a moment to check out the best tweets from NephMadness 2014. The winners of each match are determined by a Blue Ribbon Panel of judges. It is a mixture of training program directors, renal physiology/pathophysiology instructors, and journal editors.

• Dan Weiner, Deputy Editor, American Journal of Kidney Diseases
• Scott Gilbert, Education Editor, American Journal of Kidney Diseases
• Melanie Hoenig, Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School
• Nancy Adams, Chair, American Society of Nephrology (ASN) Training Program Directors Executive Committee
• Roger Rodby, Fellowship Program Director, Rush University Medical Center; ASN Board Review Instructor
• David S. Goldfarb, Chief of Nephrology at the New York Harbor VA Medical Center and the Clinical Chief of Nephrology at the New York University Langone Medical Center
• Jeffrey Berns, Professor of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania; Editor-in-Chief, Medscape Nephrology; oh yes, and President of the National Kidney Foundation

The Blue Ribbon Panel will determine the winners of each matchup by the March 22nd deadline for entering the contest. There are prizes. One copy of National Kidney Foundation Primer on Kidney Diseases will be awarded to the top overall score, top medical student score, top resident score, top fellow score, and top attending score. Additionally, a NephMadness travel mug & stressball will be awarded to (after excluding the scores of the grand prize winners) the 9 remaining overall top scores, the best tweeter and the best blogger. The official rules of NephMadness 2015 are available for the legally inclined. Most importantly, it is free.

Why is there a NephMadness?

The creators of NephMadness wrote an editorial in March’s AJKD, take a look at it. Co-creator Dr. Topf wrote a post about it for MedScape, take a look at it (free registration required). We see online social media as a major game changer for medical education, but at the same time we see a significant barrier to getting started. When you are new, the social media space can be a bit bewildering. The idea was that a game may bring some purpose and focus for nephrologists trying to explore social media. This is intended to be a fun and entertaining project. Please have and engage with it. The scouting reports we created with our selection committee are intended to orient players to all the concepts that populate our field. They are fully referenced and are a great place to start your research but they are in no way comprehensive reviews or book chapters. Additionally, though they have been proofed and edited by our experts they are written by general nephrologists and research nephrologists, but out of their core area of expertise. We are sure there are mistakes. If important and worthy studies are overlooked contact us by making a comment or tweet the mistake. If we could add a Wikipedia-like EDIT button we would. We want to make the content better and are delighted to fix any issues that are discovered. The purpose of NephMadness is to learn, share, teach and most importantly have fun. We hope everyone has as much fun playing NephMadness as we did creating it. Enjoy NephMadness 2015: Nephrology as a Cornerstone of Medicine.

• Joel Topf
• Matt Sparks
• Edgar Lerma
• Paul Phelan
• Warren Kupin
• Kenar Jhaveri

Submit your picks! | For more on NephMadness 2015 | #NephMadness on Twitter