Healthcare is expensive.

That’s obvious.

But what does it cost?

They’re not the same question, and the difference is fueling a proverbial fire on Capitol Hill. The End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) final rule was released last Friday, and the Dialysis Patient Citizens (the largest non-profit dialysis patient advocacy group in the US) had some choice words to say about it.

According to the president of the group, Andrew Conkling, “The rule also refuses to acknowledge the injustice of dialysis patients who experience pruritis [itching] being unable to obtain a new, effective treatment for this condition, due to the agency’s inflexible dialysis payment methodology. The rule further solidifies an outrageous status quo, perpetuating unnecessary suffering and deterring researchers and venture capitalists from pursuing improvements to kidney care. CMS needs to do more than just acknowledge the plight of dialysis patients – it should take concrete steps to increase access to life-saving treatments.”

Healthcare is expensive.

But is the true cost of healthcare measured in dollars or in patients’ health and patients’ lives? We pass many lives every day on the way to work, rolling down the interstate beside us. As far as we know, absorbed in our decisions and struggles, they might as well be floating heads. But each of them—every person on this 8 billion-strong planet—has a backstory as deep and complex as our own.

So, isn’t their hemodialysis care—their lives—worth just as much as ours?

At Transonic, we think so. Therefore, we built the HD03.

The HD03 measures dialysis access flow, delivered flow, and recirculation. With these measurements, clinicians can quickly and easily determine if the machine is delivering your proper dialysis prescription, and can receive early warning about a host of potential issues before they become dangerous, like access stenosis.

As Mr. Conkling so pointedly said, the Medicare system that supports hemodialysis needs work. It needs to function as smoothly as our HD03 does. But regardless of whether you’re a patient or a clinician, you wouldn’t want your life measured in a dollar-amount.

We think your life has inestimable value, that’s why we don’t measure it at all…

Just the blood flow that sustains it.

Thanks for reading, 

               Transonic Systems, Inc.

                               The Measure of Better Results

Reference Article:

Dialysis Patient Citizens Responds to Disappointing Final CMS Rule That Will Harm Patient Healthcare - Dialysis Patient Citizens (dialysispatients.org)