On Thursday, Aug. 22, Encompass Health Rehabilitation Hospital of Sarasota held a grand opening celebration to unveil its new dialysis suite. The 116-bed inpatient rehabilitation hospital is located at 6400 Edgelake Drive.

Over 800,000 people in the U.S. are living with end-stage renal disease (ESRD), most often caused by diabetes or hypertension. Dialysis treatment is imperative for those affected with ESRD, as it cleans the blood of toxins and removes the fluid once the kidneys have failed.

With the addition of the in-house dialysis suite, which includes five state-of-the-art Tablo machines operated by skilled dialysis nurses, Encompass Health Rehabilitation Hospital of Sarasota is uniquely positioned to treat inpatient rehabilitation patients requiring dialysis. Tablo machines provide a gentler treatment experience, decreasing fatigue and increasing patients’ ability to fully participate in therapy sessions. The hospital invested more than half a million dollars in this renovation.

“It’s more functional now, and everyone is just excited to see what we have next,” Program Manager Audreal Dreher said.

“In an outpatient setting, they’d have to leave their home, go to a dialysis center, three hours of dialysis and an hour of travel perhaps to a dialysis center and another hour back. And so they lose out on their therapies. Here, everything’s under one roof so it kind of works out well from an efficiency perspective,” said Medical Director Alexander Dejesus, MD.

The hospital is also exploring the integration of a new form of dialysis with physical therapy, known as Interdialytic Therapies, to further enhance patient care.