Policy and Politics News

Advocates from the American Society of Nephrology 21 other health care organizations (listed below) met with their representatives and senators on Sept. 19 to urge Congress to continue its historic support of research funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and to cosponsor and pass the Living Donor Protection Act (H.R. 1270), no-cost legislation to eliminate barriers to living donation and increase access to transplants.

Measuring quality is important in dialysis care, and payers, including Medicare, have the right to know how well their customers are being treated. But dialysis providers and professional groups are questioning whether current quality measures for outpatient dialysis patients are a good fit for evaluating patients with acute kidney injury.

The California bill that would set minimum staffing requirements and other regulations for dialysis clinics has been tabled.

The fireworks started early this year in Washington. Not only did the Senate reveal a health care reform plan, but the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services also unveiled another highly anticipated document: the 2018 (Year 2) of the Quality Payment Program (QPP) rule.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has cleared NxStage Medical Inc.’s System One for solo home hemodialysis, without a care partner, during waking hours.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this article included inaccurately reported data from the trial. The true results are noted in this article in bullet points. 

In what other profession can one be as ill-prepared to understand the complexity of appropriately billing for services as in medicine? After years of intense study of the clinical minutia of nephrology and passing multiple examinations culminating in board certification, nephrologists enter practice generally naive of how to appropriately document, code, and bill–which are the life blood of operating a successful practice and earning an income. Add to this the complex and growing body of regulations, an increase in the required coding specificity and payer requirements, and we have a formula for physician frustration, burn-out, and failure.

Two unions that backed a one-day strike at Fresenius Medical Care dialysis clinics in New York in June have reached contract agreements with the dialysis provider.

Armed with new tools to help them, patients and parents felt empowered to remind health care providers to perform hand hygiene, successfully improving compliance rates, according to a new study published in the August issue of the American Journal of Infection Control. But less than 60% of health care providers surveyed felt that patients should be involved in reminding providers to perform hand hygiene.

Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West filed two ballot initiatives Aug. 9 with the California Attorney General for the November 2018 election. The initiatives contain rules for state dialysis clinics similar to those found in the pending bills SB 349  and AB 251.