Doctors aren’t always sending people to the best clinic. I do believe many people are going to clinics where their nephs are the medical director, sounds like a conflict of interest if I ever heard one.
Looks like some doctors here in Colorado would have preferred sending their patients elsewhere and finally had to quit their roles as medical directors to get on with other dialysis companies.
The Stark law ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stark_Law ) is supposed to prevent doctors from sending people to a facility where the physician has a financial interest, but nephs got an exemption.
Surprise! It is causing problems:
"The mud began to fly last year when the second-largest group of Denver kidney doctors, called nephrologists, ended their exclusive affiliation with DaVita and partnered with a Massachusetts dialysis company entering the Denver market. Near the same time, the largest nephrology group in Colorado Springs dumped DaVita in favor of Liberty Dialysis, which recently opened two dialysis centers in the city.
DaVita quickly sued doctors in both cities, plus a nurse battling breast cancer who quit her job at a DaVita dialysis center and took one with Liberty."
I just wanted to also mention the old DialysisEthics website ( http://www.dialysisethics.org/ ) is back up and we are working on a new one. I’m the new front person of the organization and hope you will drop by. DialysisEthics fought a hard fight, but now we feel we can tone that down. We want to be part of the solutions we see coming, rather than continue to point out problems. So come see what we have been up to over the years and I guarantee we have more surprises!
I think a lot of us in this industry want the same things–better outcomes for folks on dialysis primarily.