Research Library

Federal mandates have affected nearly all areas of dialysis care delivery. Nonresident scholar Kevin F. Erickson and Wolfgang C. Winkelmayer evaluate the evidence behind two prior federal mandates to assess how the quality of evidence supporting each policy contributed to its overall success.

In a study published by JAMA Internal Medicine, nonresident scholar Kevin Erickson — an assistant professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine — and his co-authors examined associations between dialysis facility performance and patient experience measures as well as patient, facility and geographic characteristics:

By Kevin Erickson, Wolfgang C. Winkelmayer, Vivian Ho, Jay Bhattacharya, and Glenn M. Chertow The authors investigate if dialysis facility consolidation was associated with patient mortality. They find that decreased market competition for these facilities may have led to increased mortality for patients in areas with very few dialysis centers. Read this article in Value in Health at: https://bit.ly/2LXmTUR.

This study examines whether market competition affects quality of care and health outcomes among patients receiving dialysis treatment.

The authors conducted mobile phone surveys on energy supply, demand and quality in 12 sub-Saharan African countries, finding that current grid and off-grid electricity supply is inadequate to meet consumers' demands.

Nonresident scholar Kevin Erickson is a co-author of a study that examined trends in employment among patients initiating dialysis and in the six months before end stage renal disease.

The authors examine ways in which disruptive technologies could potentially help improve power sector development in African countries. 

In this study, the authors examine the impact of consolidation among U.S. dialysis providers on: 1) the ability of patients to choose among competing dialysis providers and 2) the market concentration of providers in each hospital service area.

The winner’s curse — overestimating the value of an asset and therefore overpaying — is often associated with acquisitions of publicly-traded firms but not with private acquisitions. Using an event study methodology for over 22,000 private acquisitions of U.S. firms between 1985 and 2015, the authors examine a possible winner’s curse for such acquisitions, testing variables to determine what characteristics make a private company more likely to overestimate the asset's value.

The Medicare program’s transition in 2004 to tiered fee-for-service physician reimbursement for dialysis care had the unintended consequence of reducing use of home dialysis. In this paper, authors evaluate whether payment reform influenced dialysis modality assignment.