Policy and Politics News

BOSTON — The National Kidney Foundation president told a large audience here at the NKF Spring Clinical Meetings, “You lean in, and we all win.”

WASHINGTON — Two members of the U.S. House of Representatives discussed the lack of progress in treatment for kidney disease and the need to “do better” at the KidneyX Summit.

Saying the payment system for the Medicare ESRD Program is “outdated” and “has some of the worst incentives in American health care,” HHS Secretary Alex M. Azar II announced at the National Kidney Foundation’s Annual Patient Summit that the agency is developing new models that encourage a shift from paying for sick patients to one that focuses on improving outcomes, including use of more home dialysis, expanding financial incentives and access to organs for kidney transplantation, and a push for earlier detection and treatment of kidney disease.1

WASHINGTON — A speaker at the KidneyX Summit addressed three goals of the HHS that could aid in the efforts to transform the kidney care community to better prevent, diagnose and treat kidney disease.

While the ESRD Seamless Care Organizations, Dialysis Patients Act and Renal Physicians Association Model all address integrated care, according to the published perspective of a nonprofit dialysis provider, the biggest differences are the optimization of patient care vs. provider financial return.

Constructing a national registry to improve long-term monitoring of living kidney donors — in a way that is similar to the continued care provided to recipients — could be valuable in preventing the likelihood of donors experiencing an adverse event, according to a recently published study.

Medicare pays dialysis clinics that qualify for its low-volume payment adjustment almost 24% more per treatment than urban dialysis facilities to compensate for higher operational costs. However, according to a new report, in many cases, facilities that apply for the adjustment – and get an additional 0.8% adjustment for being a rural clinic – may be gaming the system by capping the number of treatments to qualify for the bonus payments.

DALLAS — Nephrology News & Issues has compiled the top five stories from our live coverage of the Annual Dialysis Conference in March. These include a study that suggested an educational tool encourages patients to transition to home dialysis and findings that indicated currently available dialysis machines may not be well-suited for small children and may result in unintended adverse effects.

The California Assembly’s Committee on Labor voted unanimously on April 3 to approve a bill that would prohibit life, disability and long-term care insurers from discriminating against living organ donors by charging them higher premiums or denying them insurance.

CHICAGO – CMS’s Innovation Center “will really be the playing field” for developments in 2019 in an effort to move away from fee-for-service medicine and create new value-based care models, Robert Blaser, director of public policy for the Renal Physicians Association, said in a presentation here.