Three times a week, patients stay seated for fours hours per session, connected to a machine that does what two kidneys can no longer do. For the four million people globally on hemodialysis, that rhythm is permanent.
“We’re used to our kidneys working 24/7,” Dimitris Moulavasilis, Group Chief Executive Officer of M42, told Khaleej Times. “Haemodialysis patients are coming three times a week for the rest of their lives. Between sessions, the fluid doesn’t leave the body. They can gain two to three kilos. And health systems incur a cost for keeping them alive, before medications, hospitalisation and everything else.”
M42, an Abu Dhabi-based global tech-enabled health company, owns Diaverum, the third largest haemodialysis provider in the world, serving over 43,000 patients across 24 countries. Today, it launched a platform designed to reach patients earlier, before chronic kidney disease progresses to the point where dialysis becomes part of life.
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Kidney.com is an AI-powered kidney health assistant built to reach the hundreds of millions of people living with early-stage chronic kidney disease. It launches today in the UAE, UK, France, Germany, and Portugal, free to access, available in five languages, and designed to function as a 24/7 educational coach for patients who need guidance on diet, medication, and self-management but cannot always reach a specialist.
M42 is clear on the platform being built to support education, self-management, and more informed conversations between patients and their clinicians. The AI tool is also a step toward a broader shift in health AI, away from general-purpose chatbots toward condition-specific systems trained around a single disease area with clinical depth behind them.
That clinical grounding sets kidney.com apart from most consumer health tools. It was developed with more than 30 nephrologists across 13 countries, trained on 35 years of Diaverum’s renal care expertise, and tested through more than 14,000 real conversations before launch.
“What makes it different is that it has been trained in a combination of the best AI capability available in M42 and the 35 years of haemodialysis experience from Diaverum,” Moulavasilis said. “It has been tested by 30 nephrologists, physicians, and nurses globally, and by nephrology associations from around the world. We had more than 14,000 real-world conversations with the system before launch.”
The predictive capability already embedded in Diaverum’s clinical operations shows what the technology can do when applied at depth. M42’s AI currently identifies the risk of fistula thrombosis, a clotting complication that can block dialysis access, a week before it occurs.
Moulavasilis said patients treated within M42’s AI-supported renal care model live 30 per cent longer, a figure he linked to earlier intervention, predictive monitoring, and more consistent care delivery.
Kidney.com operates upstream of that clinical environment, targeting the estimated 35 to 40 million people in stage three and four of chronic kidney disease globally. These are patients who still have time. The platform is designed to help them use it. Chronic kidney disease is also among the costliest conditions for health systems globally, with annual costs in Europe alone estimated at 140 billion euros.
In the UAE, CKD affects an estimated four to five per cent of adults, a figure that rises sharply with age. Studies show that well-informed patients are less likely to be hospitalised and less likely to visit emergency departments, making the case for earlier education.
The technology is built with data sovereignty as a design principle. Patient data processed through kidney.com in the UAE stays in the UAE, held in a local sovereign instance rather than routed to external servers.
“If you upload something to kidney.com, it stays in Abu Dhabi,” Moulavasilis said. “Similarly, we have data centres in Europe in all the places we operate. We comply with every data privacy law in every jurisdiction we launch in.”
The platform was built in Abu Dhabi and is now live across Europe and the Gulf. Diabetes is next. M42 is already preparing a parallel platform for its 43,000 diabetes patients at Imperial College London Diabetes Centre in the UAE, with global rollout to follow.
Kidney.com is available at kidney.com/ae for UAE users from today.
Source: Khaleej Times