About 37 million people in the U.S. have chronic kidney disease, yet about 40% of those with severely reduced kidney function don’t know they have the chronic disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One company aims to change this through early diagnosis.

Home care company Signify Health announced Tuesday that it has added an in-home kidney health evaluation to its platform. The Dallas-based company was recently acquired by CVS Health and mostly serves Medicare Advantage plans. It has a Diagnostic and Preventive Services offering that provides in-home evaluations of different conditions, including for spirometry, peripheral artery disease and bone density. These evaluations are administered by its national network of 11,000 clinicians.

The kidney health evaluation is now part of the Diagnostic and Preventive Services offering. Signify Health will use its diagnostic algorithms to determine which members of its health plan customers are at high-risk for kidney disease.

“Very often, that is a member who has been previously diagnosed with diabetes, but there are other risk factors as well,” said Dr. Heidi Schwarzwald, chief medical officer of Signify Health Home and Community Services, in an interview. “We will then use that information we have from previous claims and other data to determine who needs the assessment. While our provider or clinician is in the home, they’ll discuss this with the member.”

To conduct the evaluation, the Signify Health clinician will have the patient do a finger prick and a urine test. Based on the results, the company can then refer patients to their primary care physician or a specialist if they’re in need of further treatment. This could mean additional testing, lifestyle changes or pharmacological treatment.

The company launched the kidney disease evaluation to help its health plan customers identify patients with chronic kidney disease early on.

“Chronic kidney disease — when not diagnosed and not taken care of early — can lead to dialysis, can lead to kidney transplant, can lead to secondary cardiovascular complications,” Schwarzwald said. “There is importance in early diagnosis where it can be treated with lifestyle changes, with medications, perhaps with working with a specialist to avoid many of those downstream effects.”

Medicare members with chronic kidney disease have a hospitalization rate that is 2.4 times higher than Medicare members without chronic kidney disease. Medicare costs for people with chronic kidney disease reached $87.2 billion in 2019, or nearly $24,500 per Medicare beneficiary.

Signify Health aims to improve these stats and “allow Medicare members to have early diagnosis and early treatment of this disease,” Schwarzman said.

Another company supporting kidney disease is Strive Health, which uses technology and analytics to determine what disease stage patients are in and connects them with a care team. Monogram Health also provides care for patients with chronic kidney and end-stage renal disease.

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