The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has launched the Kidney Care National Plan, intended to help prevent kidney failure and expanding treatment options in the home.
Building on past federal attempts to bolster kidney healthcare, the HHS aims, in part, to detect, prevent, and treat kidney diseases before they turn into kidney failure and to restore dialysis competition through the new initiative, according to a Tuesday statement.
“The lack of innovation in kidney care and the anticompetitive kidney market is the structural outcome of burdensome actions and regulations that have sustained a national crisis of kidney disease,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in the statement.
Aside from preventing kidney failure and improve dialysis care, the three-pronged initiative also aims to reform kidney transplantation by modernizing the organ donation and transplantation system the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network.
HHS’ Kidney Care National Plan follows other federal efforts to bring kidney care into the home to help reduce costs.
For instance, the new initiative claims to directly advance President Donald Trump’s 2019 executive order to promote kidney healthcare and disease prevention.
The executive order, in part, directed the HHS secretary to select a payment model incentivizing greater use of home dialysis treatments for Medicare beneficiaries. On Tuesday, the HHS stated that this executive order laid the foundation for kidney care to expand beyond in-center dialysis, citing that home dialysis use rose from 10.5% in 2017 to 16% in 2023, hitting the highest level in a decade.
At the time of the 2019 executive order, home-based care industry experts said the executive order could help promote home health opportunities for kidney treatments.
“Currently, home health providers do not widely offer dialysis or other specialized kidney treatment, in part because of reimbursement barriers and a lack of overall financial incentives,” Michael Cantor, then chief medical officer of the healthcare company CareCentrix, told Home Health Care News around the time of the initiative. Cantor is now the CMO of the healthcare data analytics firm AlignCare.
Home-based kidney healthcare often entails hemodialysis, a treatment in which a machine pumps blood through a filter outside the body to remove biological waste and extra fluid, regulate blood pressure and balance minerals in the blood, according to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK).
As of 2023, total Medicare costs for people with end-stage renal disease (ESRD), a severe form of kidney disease that requires dialysis or a kidney transplant, hit an all-time high of $55.3 billion.
Dialysis has increasingly become a part of home healthcare. By the end of 2011, 14.1% of individuals undergoing dialysis did so at home. By the end of 2021, that percentage increased by 45%, according to NIDDK data.
In-home kidney care was front and center in Ares’ Private Equity Group’s (NYSE: ARES) and DaVita’s (NYSE: DVA) strategic investment in Elara Caring earlier this year. As part of the investment, Elara Caring and DaVita agreed to develop a kidney-specific home-based care model.
