Operations and Business Environment - Fresenius Medical Care

02. 3
Our Fiscal year
water. They are able to purify about three-fourths of
the processed water. This saves nearly 100 liters of
freshwater per dialysis treatment. Usage of ultrapure
water is a key quality criterion in the production of dialyzers
and during dialysis treatments. We need large
amounts of this resource, so even small changes in the
required quantities can lead to considerable savings.
In North America, we employ modern, environmentally
friendly technologies to continually save energy. In the
year under review, we increased our usage of heat exchangers,
which enable us to obtain residual heat from
water used for industrial purposes and which we use
to heat up freshwater for dialysis treatment. As a result,
we recover about three-fourths of the heat, which
was previously unused, and thus reduce the energy
consumption in our clinics substantially and cut costs.
example, the phosphate level and the so-called Kt/V
value, which gives an indication of a treatment’s effectiveness
by establishing the ratio of the length of treatment
and the filtration rate of certain toxic molecules.
Albumin is a protein that can be used to monitor a
patient’s general nutritional condition. The relative urea
reduction ratio (URR) is another indicator measuring
the effectiveness of a dialysis treatment. The higher the
URR, the less urea there is in the patient’s blood. The
number of days the patient has to spend in hospital is
also an important indicator of the treatment quality, as
hospital days are an especially cost-intensive factor and
reduce the quality of life of dialysis patients.
Below you will find a table showing the development
of important quality parameters in our North American
and European clinics.
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Moreover, we expanded our eco-controlling system
so that now data such as water and energy consumption
are recorded. When these data are analyzed, weak
points can be identified more easily and resource conservation
improvements can be initiated. Since 2006,
we have also recorded this data in our clinics in South
Africa and a few Latin American countries.
To evaluate the quality of our dialysis treatments, we
make use of quality parameters that are recognized by
the dialysis industry, such as hemoglobin values. Hemoglobin
in the human body is primarily used to transport
oxygen from the lungs to the tissue that needs to be
supplied with it. We aspire to have a large percentage
of our patients at a hemoglobin level of at least 11 grams
per deciliter blood – the hemoglobin level of a healthy
person being only slightly higher. Further indicators
used in evaluating our treatment quality include, for
Quality data
for the final quarter U.S. 1 2006 U.S. 1 2005 Europe 2006 Europe 2005
URR > 65
Kt / V > 1.2
Hemoglobin ≥ 11 g/dl
Albumin ≥ 3.5 g/dl 2
Hospital days per patient per year
91%
95 %
83 %
80 %
11.7
91%
94 %
82 %
79 %
11.9
91 %
93 %
71 %
86 %
8.2
92 %
93 %
66 %
86 %
8.3
1
Excluding clinics of the former Renal Care Group
2
International standard BCR CRM470
Fresenius Medical Care 2006