Patient Care

The Division has two faculty attending on the consult service throughout the year at Los Angeles General Medical Center. These faculty see all of the renal consults and provide follow-up visits with the house staff, fellows and students. Division Chief Dr. Kenneth Hallows conducts weekly rounds on the renal service, and Nephrology and Hypertension faculty attend in the renal clinics throughout the year. In addition, the Division performs approximately 400 acute dialyses per month and sees 30 to 50 patients per session in the general renal outpatient clinics at Los Angeles General Medical Center.

The Division of Nephrology and Hypertension provides highly specialized care for many indigent patients in Los Angeles County who have all aspects of kidney diseases, hypertension, kidney stones and kidney transplant. These patients are seen at the Los Angeles General Medical Center Outpatient Center. The Division runs the Diabetic Nephropathy Clinic at Los Angeles General Medical Center, which is fully staffed by highly qualified faculty.

The mission of the Chronic Kidney Disease clinics is to educate patients about their kidney diseases; to prevent the progression to end-stage renal disease and prevent and treat its complications; to diagnose and treat secondary and complicated forms of hypertension; to diagnose and treat different metabolic stone diseases; and to prepare those with advanced kidney disease for the appropriate renal replacement therapy. In addition, the clinics provide treatment for anemia of chronic kidney disease, secondary hyperparathyroidism and metabolic bone disease due to renal osteodystrophy. The faculty also provide ambulatory training and education for medical students, medicine interns, residents and Nephrology fellows on the service. In addition, the clinics provide care for many long-term kidney transplant patients on multiple immunosuppressive medications.

The Division has developed a Diabetic Nephropathy Clinic to provide care to patients with diabetes and kidney disease and to develop research protocols for this disease.

Nephrology and Hypertension faculty admit patients and provides renal replacement therapy and consultation services at KH and Norris. At present, the Division has approximately 249 hemodialysis and 82 continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis patients at DaVita-USC. In addition, Nephrology and Hypertension faculty see ambulatory patients at Healthcare Center 2.

The USC Hypertension Center is a comprehensive clinical program for the diagnosis and management of patients with secondary and resistant forms of hypertension. The Hypertension Center is staffed by full-time teaching faculty who are certified in hypertension. Besides physician specialists, resources include clinical nurse specialists, nutritionists and pharmacologists. The Center specializes in the diagnosis and management of renovascular hypertension, pheochomocythoma and primary aldosteronism, and in the management of resistant hypertension and orthostatic hypotension. This Center has been ranked number one in the country for quality care and clinical outcome.

The kidney transplant program at USC is the fastest growing program of its kind in Los Angeles. The transplant waiting list and number of transplants performed has grown steadily over the last several years. Out of more than 300 programs in the country, the USC program ranked number 45 in the nation by volume in the year 2014. In 2015, 158 kidney transplants were performed, the highest annual volume since the inception of the program–131 of these were kidney transplant alone; 21 were a combination of kidney/liver and; the remaining 6 were a combination of kidney/pancreas. Not only has the program grown in numbers, but the outcomes at the center have placed it as a premier kidney transplant institute. It has recently been ranked number seven in the nation for outcomes by Carechex, an independent organization. It is the only program in Los Angeles with a statistically superior deceased-donor transplant rate and a statistically superior one-year graft survival rate.

The program was certified by the American Society of Transplantation for a transplant fellowship in 2014. Dr. Rahul Dhawan was recruited as the first transplant renal fellow in the program for 2014-2015. The transplant program is one of the only programs in the country to perform kidney-pancreas transplants in type 2 diabetics and transfusion-free living-donor kidney transplants. Faculty in the program have published and presented at national transplant meetings.