Monday, January 25, 2010

The Business of Dialysis

An interesting figure in this month's ASN Kidney News details the quarterly earnings for three major dialysis companies in the U.S.: DaVita, Dialysis Corporation of America (DCA), and Fresenius.

Also included in the figure (not shown here) is the "revenue per treatment"--that is, how much profit each company obtains from the average patient's dialysis run. For example, Fresenius reported a revenue per treatment of $348 for the 3rd quarter of 2009. I'm not sure how they arrive at these numbers, but you can do a quick calculation to figure out how much a single patient dialyzing on the standard 3x/week schedule is worth to the company on a yearly basis: $348/treatment x 3 treatments/week x 52 weeks/year = $54,288.00/year. Like it or not, dialysis is also a business.

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