ABOUT PEAK

Kidney Care Partners’ Performance Excellence and Accountability in Kidney Care (PEAK) is a voluntary quality improvement campaign to reduce mortality among first-year dialysis patients by 20 percent by the end of 2012 – an effort to extend, even save, 10,000 lives – a real goal for real change.

All too often, the onset of chronic kidney disease (CKD) is gradual and undetected, leaving patients especially vulnerable when the disease is recognized. Helping patients to understand their disease and to manage it appropriately is an essential ingredient to high-quality care for newly diagnosed patients.

Working with researchers and other experts in the kidney care community, the PEAK Campaign will initiate a systematic community-wide process of identifying and sharing ‘breakthrough’ practices that will improve survival rates.

Campaign participants believe that in addition to improving and extending the lives of people with kidney failure, PEAK will also help reduce hospitalizations which in turn will help lower Medicare costs.

The community is partnering with Brown University and Quality Partners of Rhode Island to measure our success in improving patient outcomes and developing tools to reduce mortality in first-year dialysis patients.

Consistently over the past ten years, end-stage renal disease (ESRD) survival rates have improved; however, first-year mortality has remained stable compared to overall mortality. The kidney care community has recognized the need to improve the first-year mortality rate as compared to other industrialized nations.

The PEAK campaign was launched by Kidney Care Partners (KCP), a broad-based coalition of kidney patient advocacy groups, health care professional organizations, dialysis service providers and manufacturers who seek to improve quality of care available to the 400,000 Americans currently diagnosed with kidney failure.  LEARN MORE