Honoring Patient Preferences: The 2016 National Kidney Foundation Presidential Address
Initiation of dialysis therapy with a home-based modality has grown steadily since 2007, but even so only accounts for approximately 10% of incident dialysis patients.1 Recent trends show increasing use of home dialysis, particularly peritoneal dialysis (PD),1 suggesting that home dialysis therapies may have been substantially underused in the past. However, it is not possible to know the “right” fraction for home dialysis uptake because this would require knowing—both before and after the start of dialysis therapy—what fully informed and educated patients would choose, free from misinformed or biased opinions of others and from forces imposed by economic factors on their health care providers.