Erich Ditschman is spending time with his 9-year-old son Wednesday afternoon but at the same time he's on hemodialysis.

"Friday night, if I have to dialyze, we have movie night; and so the whole family's here and I'm sitting here dialyzing. You just can't beat that," said Erich Ditschman who uses portable hemodialysis.

After 2 unsuccessful kidney transplants, Ditschman has now been using a Next Stage portable hemodialysis machine that work likes his kidney, filtering out toxins and water through tubes. Instead of just three days a week he can now dialyze six days, improving his eating, sleeping and his overall lifestyle.

"The energy that you get is not quite as much as of course a full working kidney, but tremendously more than going three times a week to traditional dialysis," Ditschman said.

Patients are trained on the portable hemodialysis machines at centers just like the Davita at Home center in East Lansing where they're trained on the equipment in just three to five weeks.

"They not only have this set time that they choose to do the dialysis; they get better dialysis at home, and more frequent dialysis gets to be a much much better outcome for their quality of their life," said Nicholas Adolf a training nurse at the center.

Hemodialysis International says patients taking daily dialysis have a 61 percent better survival rate compared to conventional dialysis. That's why centers like Davita at Home are hoping to build on their current three patients.

"They sleep better; their moods are better, they have more activity," Adolf said.