Dr Holly Kramer Discusses Components of the Advancing American Kidney Health Initiative

The Advancing American Kidney Health initiative launched by HHS has a broad range of focus that includes kidney disease awareness, early diagnosis, and improvements in transplantation, according to Holly Kramer, MD, MPH, professor of medicine and public health sciences at Loyola University Chicago and president of the National Kidney Foundation.

Transcript

What are the most important components of the Advancing American Kidney Health initiative?

The importance of the Advancing American Kidney Health initiative is that it does create a very broad range of activities to address kidney disease. So in the past, other administrations have addressed kidney disease, but it was really focused on the cost of end-stage renal disease. This is a much more broad perspective on kidney disease, because it’s going to focus on trying to increase awareness of kidney disease in the general public, so it’s going to have a public health awareness campaign component to it. It’s going to be trying to increase the number of organs that are available for kidney transplantation so that more people are transplanted. And it’s also going to try to give optional payment models so that physicians will diagnose kidney disease earlier, and then it’s also going to try to incentivize home dialysis.

So it has a really broad range of focus to improve a wide range of aspects about kidney disease to really reduce the epidemic of end-stage renal disease. I think that’s what’s really unique and important about it, is that it covers the awareness of kidney disease, early diagnosis of kidney disease, and then if kidney disease fails and leads to kidney failure, then we’re going to try to get patients at home or get them transplanted.