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.

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.

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 United States Renal Data System (USRDS) has often been used to study the timing of dialysis initiation, measured by estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) at dialysis initiation. However, it is not clear how well this information explains the eGFR variation at dialysis initiation, nor how well eGFR serves as a measure for the timing of dialysis initiation. Researchers examined these questions using USRDS data for nearly one million patients who started dialysis between 1995 and 2012.

Recent policy changes have affected the way that Medicare pays for dialysis, with the goal of improving the overall quality and efficiency of care. As with any new health care payment model, there is a need to determine whether these changes affect health disparities. Does the new model inadvertently lead to worse outcomes for some patients, or does it create new incentives for providers to help overcome barriers to care? In a paper published in Health Services Research, investigators evaluated the effect of these recent Medicare changes on potential disparities in the use of one type of dialysis: peritoneal dialysis.

Few studies have examined women’s body image after giving birth, and those that have suggest that many women experience negative body image. Even less well understood is the relationship between genital changes associated with childbirth, body image, and sexual health.

New research published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology examines whether adjustment for race in statistical models obscures or clarifies disparities in quality of care for minority groups on dialysis.