Program to Help Kidney Patients

Program to Help Kidney Patients

November 20, 2007 - 3:15 PM

(Liz Bonis) -- Doctors have launched a new program that could help save more than a billion health care dollars every year. A new program called CAP is designed to cap off some of the money spent each year on patients with chronic kidney disease.

Three days a week, Phyllis Rush comes into Dialysis Corporation of America. She gets hooked up to a machine, which filters the blood like her own kidneys.

The problem is the vascular access site, where the machine normally gets connected through a tiny tube in her arm, recently blocked off, so doctors had to put in a different type of hook-up.

“They inserted what they call a cardiac catheter, which runs over the heart, and it also does the purpose of what a catheter in the arm would do,” she said.

It works for now, but Dr. Prabir Roy-Chaudhury said many people have problems with this type of vascular access too. It's painful and can get expensive.

“Twenty to twenty-five percent of hospital admissions in dialysis are due to patient problems with vascular access and we spend about a billion and a half dollars on the problem of vascular access dysfunction,” he said.

To intervene, Roy-Chaudhury's team recently launched CAP, a new tracking and research program. They've started several clinical trials making a difference for patients who chronic problems while on dialysis.

One uses a wrap--which releases medication at the access site --some of the others are new drug trials.

“One of them is a gene therapy study; the other is where we apply a drug that is going to dilate the vessels,” Roy-Chaudhury said.

The ultimate goal is good dialysis and access, while saving money and lives. Results of these clinical trials are not expected for at least a couple of years.

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