Dirk Hentschel is Director of Interventional Nephrology, Brigham Health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Faulkner Hospital (BWFH), and Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Hentschel received his medical degree from the Charité - University Medicine Berlin. After internal medicine residency at Montefiore Medical Center, The Bronx, NY, and nephrology fellowship at BWH and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA, he trained in interventional nephrology with Thomas Vesely, M.D., and Steven Bander, M.D., in St. Louis, MO.
He is President of the Vascular Access Society of the Americas (VASA), and previously was a Council member of the American Society of Interventional and Diagnostic Nephrology (ASDIN), member of the ASDIN Research Committee. He was a founding member of the Intervention Nephrology Advisory Group for the ASN (INAg).
The Brigham Health dialysis access program currently serves dialysis patients in and around Boston and New England and receives referrals from over 50 dialysis units in more than 6 states. Care is provided in close collaboration with Brigham Health access surgeons from the vascular and transplant surgery divisions. The center performs over 2500 endovascular procedures annually, two of its trainees now lead dialysis access programs in Colorado and California.
Dr. Hentschel has a strong interest in process of care centered on access creation , maintenance, and successful use in the dialysis unit. At BWH this has led to autogenous access maturation and use rates at 2 years of over 80% while moving towards forearm fistula frequency of at least 60%. Dr. Hentschel is a frequent speaker at national and international dialysis access conferences with over 120 presentations. He participates as site Co-PI in several device trials, is active as consultant to a variety of device companies in the field of dialysis access and has been a proctor for novel clinical devices in the dialysis access space.