News & Resources

Three times a week, hundreds of thousands of Americans with end-stage kidney disease trudge to dialysis centers to get the treatment that keeps them alive. Costs are exorbitant and growing, and many patients aren’t even told there may be other options.

Dr. Carmen Peralta, a nationally known kidney expert at UCSF and chief medical officer for Cricket Health, joins Dan Diamond to discuss the historic problems with U.S. kidney care and what Trump’s plan could accomplish (starts at the 1:35 mark).

The administration set ambitious goals to move people out of traditional dialysis and to encourage organ donations.

Trump’s executive order — slated to be timed to his 11 a.m. speech Wednesday morning — will direct the government to take steps intended to cut the cost of care and increase kidney donations, according to two individuals with knowledge of the announcement.

Carmen Peralta had spent over a decade researching kidney disease as a nephrologist, most recently at the University of California, San Francisco, when her groundbreaking work on the early detection of the deadly disease caught the attention of Cricket Health.

The Trump administration is working on a new payment approach for treating kidney disease that favors lower cost care at home and transplants, a change that would upend a dialysis industry that provides care in thousands of clinics nationwide.

Arvind Rajan left his managing director post at LinkedIn intent upon two things – taking some time off with his family and finding a new venture that would be hard, important, and transformative to the world.

Kidney care is often described as a space in healthcare with particular perverse incentives.

San Francisco-based Cricket Health only has about a dozen employees. But the tech-enabled kidney care provider has some big ambitions in the next year or so when it comes to disrupting the world of kidney care.

Since 2016, Cricket Health has provided advanced stage chronic kidney disease patients with technology-enabled home care through its Health Options Patient Education program.

The typical chronic kidney disease patient, if diagnosed before renal failure, learns about treatment options in a relatively quick meeting with their nephrologist, or in a one to two-hour class at a dialysis clinic.

Cricket Health won the MedCity INVEST Pitch Perfect contest for health IT companies that have raised more than $2 million.

In this guest post, Arvind Rajan, co-founder and CEO of a developer of scalable healthcare technology services designed to transform the care and treatment of people with chronic kidney disease (CKD), explains how hospitals and their providers can create a cohesive education strategy that helps eliminate information gaps and creates engaged patients.