Arbor Research Collaborative for Health, in partnership with NephCure Kidney International and Children's Hospital of Philadelphia has created a smartphone-based application to boost self-care by patients with a range of kidney and renal disorders. This tool will empower patients with kidney disease to manage their health conditions while providing opportunities to improve communication with their healthcare providers. The app was developed in collaboration with kidney disease patients, advocates, clinicians, and researchers to ensure that it addresses patient priorities and preferences for managing their health.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) selected Arbor Research Collaborative for Health as one of 31 organizations across the United States to carry out up to $1.6 billion in contract work related to health care quality measurement over the next decade. CMS designed this contracting vehicle to fund work that promotes improvements in both the quality of care and outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries and in the overall efficiency of the Medicare program.

Currently, women with lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) are treated according to their most troubling symptom. This approach is not always completely successful, as it does not take into account that patients can have multiple symptoms that respond to different treatments.

For each American who has kidney failure, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) spends more than $80,000 per year for dialysis treatment. This cost drops to only $30,000 when a patient receives a kidney transplant and no longer needs dialysis.

Infancy and early childhood is a time of critical neurodevelopment. It is also an important time for monitoring that development, particularly in children with chronic illnesses.

After an organ transplant, a transplant recipient must take immunosuppressive medications to reduce the risk of their body rejecting the transplanted organ. Although using therapeutically equivalent generic medications can reduce financial burden, the transplant community has expressed caution about substituting these for brand-name immunosuppressants.

The best option for people with end-stage kidney disease is to receive a kidney transplant. Kidney transplantation is currently performed in nearly 100 countries, and yet failure of the transplanted kidney in the long term remains an important limitation. Are there differences across countries in the rates of kidney transplant failure?

The term “lower urinary tract symptoms” (LUTS) includes a wide range of symptoms, including urgency, frequency, dysuria (painful urination), nocturia (excessive nighttime urination), post-void dribbling, and urinary incontinence. Much is still unknown about the effects of LUTS, and treatments often fall short of fully addressing the problem.

Almost all patients on hemodialysis experience anemia, a deficiency of red blood cells causing fatigue and weakness. For over two decades, nephrologists have treated anemia in hemodialysis patients with erythropoiesis-stimulating agents (ESAs) and intravenous (IV) iron. However, there is currently no consensus on the optimal IV iron dose to raise or sustain hemoglobin at appropriate levels, without very high ferritin or TSAT levels and without excessive use of ESAs.

With a critical shortage of donated organs, living donor liver transplantation (LDLT) has become widely accepted in the US as a potential alternative to deceased organ transplant. However, LDLT is a technically challenging procedure that requires sophisticated training, which has limited the growth of LDLT programs. To add to the knowledge in this area and help guide surgical decisions, researchers compared outcomes and complications after surgery for different LDLT approaches.