WALL STREET JOURNAL HIGHLIGHTS HOME DIALYSIS.

By Bill Peckham

Wall Street Journal Health Journal columnist Melinda Beck has an upbeat article available online, A Dialysis Treatment For The Busy Patient. The article reports on home dialysis, peritoneal dialysis (PD) and home hemodialysis (HHD), and gives a fair assessment of the current situation. I'm quoted, along with friends of DSEN MEI's Dori Schatell and Northwest Kidney Centers' CEO Joyce Jackson, and several other dialyzors and MDs.

It's a pretty complicated topic to cover within the confines of a news story, even harder covering both PD and HHD in the same article. While both are home modalities, they really are very different. The modalities are different with regard to the new bundle and they have different clinical advantages. Though I was glad to see mention of one clinical advantage they share:

experts worry that getting dialysis at a center makes patients more complacent about their treatment, and less careful with their health.

This the learned dependence that is the bane of incenter dialysis.

Also confusing is that some of the details in the article don't apply to both modalities - for instance the need for a helper - and some of the info is not true for the featured devices. The NxStage System One and all PD cyclers can run on a normal 110 circuit. It's only the standard hemodialysis machines (the type used incenter) that need dedicated power.

From a financial point of view (it is the WSJ) the world does get complicated when it comes to the financial incentives and it would have been hard to adequately cover them in the space available (it's hard to explain in the nearly unlimited space of this blog). One complication is that the new PPS promotes both types of home dialysis but in different ways. The medically justified additional payments aren't available for those doing PD, and it is unlikely (though it does happen) for a person to start HHD in the first 120 day of starting dialysis.

Still considering the interest level of a typical WSJ reader and the space constraints, it's a great article.