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Home Dialysis is Evaluated by a New Instrument

by Karishma Abhishek on Apr 3 2021 7:44 AM

Home Dialysis is Evaluated by a New Instrument
Patients' home dialysis experience is assessed by a newly developed tool – 26-item Home Dialysis Care Experience as per a research by the American Society of Nephrology, described in an upcoming issue of CJASN.
Home dialysis is the fastest-growing type of dialysis treatment in the the United States, that includes both peritoneal dialysis and home hemodialysis. The model allows patients to receive their dialysis treatments at home, gives patients independence and flexibility with their treatment schedules, and is associated with similar or better outcomes and lower costs compared with conventional in-center hemodialysis.

The Home Dialysis Care Experience

"Assessing patients' experience of their home dialysis care is incredibly important to make sure that quality improvement effort in home dialysis focus on areas that patients--not just doctors--consider important," says Matthew Rivara, MD (Kidney Research Institute, University of Washington).

The study team conducted a literature review to identify domains of home dialysis care that could be important to address, and then they interviewed home dialysis patients, home dialysis nurses, patient care partners, and kidney specialists.

Followed by this, a national stakeholder survey to prioritize important elements of care was also done. These efforts allowed the team to design a new survey tool to best capture the home dialysis care experience. The tool is called the Home Dialysis Care Experience (Home-DCE) instrument, a 26-item patient-reported experience measure.

"One important observation that we made in reviewing the results of our work was the central importance that all stakeholders--patients, care partners, doctors, and nurses--placed on good consistent communication and care coordination. This was universally felt to be of greater importance in evaluating high quality home dialysis care from the patient's perspective compared with other aspects of care such as facility cleanliness, timeliness of laboratory results and appointments, and a number of other factors. Another important finding was the consistency of our findings no matter who we spoke to. In general, patients, care partners, nurses, and doctors all noted similar elements of home dialysis care that were the most important," says Dr. Rivara.

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The team thereby highlights that this laudatory work of Home Dialysis Care instrument will serve as a valuable resource for future research use, clinical care, and quality improvement initiatives among home dialysis facilities and organizations.

Source-Medindia


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