Fig. 1

Study population from the US Renal Data System and electronic health records of DaVita, Inc. We selected a cohort of patients 18 years of age or older with incident ESRD between 2006 and 2011 and whose Medical Evidence Report (form CMS-2728) identified diabetes as a reported comorbidity or cause of kidney disease. We restricted the cohort to those who received their maintenance hemodialysis treatments at a DaVita outpatient facility and had no dialysis modality switches by day 90. We further restricted the cohort to those who had Medicare fee-for-service (Parts A + B) as their primary payer by 90 days after initiation of hemodialysis, and excluded patients with missing data on HbA1c, age, sex, race and ethnicity, and other covariates in the multivariable model