Progress in Kidney Care Starts at Home

A new Medicare program aims to increase the proportion of patients using home dialysis and receiving transplants. It is slightly blurred, a little grainy and overexposed, However, during the rest of the day and night I didn’t manage to get a more natural shot of the bride and her mother together. To be honest, I don’t think I could have done if I had the whole of the next day and night too!

Come January, there may be many more people like Mary Prochaska. Ms. Prochaska, 73, a retired social worker in Chapel Hill, N.C., has advanced chronic kidney disease and relies on dialysis to filter waste from her blood while she awaits a kidney transplant, her second. But she no longer visits a dialysis center three times a week, the standard treatment.

There, nurses and technicians monitored her for four hours while a machine cleansed her blood. Instead, she has opted for dialysis at home. “It’s easier on your body and better for your health,” she said. “And far better than exposing yourself to whatever you might get from being in a group of people” at a center during a pandemic. With her husband’s help, Ms. Prochaska performs peritoneal dialysis; after a surgeon implanted a tube in her side, her abdominal lining acts as the filter. After getting training for a couple of weeks, she began using a home machine called a cycler to remove excess fluid and impurities.

Nearly half of dialysis patients were older than 65.For decades, health advocates and many nephrologists have encouraged more patients to consider home dialysis. But that year, of 124,500 patients with newly diagnosed advanced kidney disease (also called end-stage renal disease), only 10 percent began peritoneal dialysis like Ms. Prochaska did. Another 2 percent turned to at-home hemodialysis, removing wastes with machines adapted from those used in centers.

It is slightly blurred, a little grainy and overexposed, However, during the rest of the day and night I didn’t manage to get a more natural shot of the bride and her mother together. To be honest, I don’t think I could have done if I had the whole of the next day and night too!