The draft United States Food and Drug Administration guidance recommends a dedicated pharmacokinetic (PK) study for most drugs intended for use in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD), including stage V patients requiring hemodialysis (HD) treatment. However, clinical studies conducted in CKD patients are challenged by difficulties in recruiting stage IV and V patients not yet on dialysis, and in balancing patient characteristics among each studied CKD group. Furthermore, study design for dialysis patients often involves a single dose administered before an HD session. The design may not necessarily represent usual patient care in current clinical practice, in which multiple doses are more likely to be administered at varying times between HD sessions. Using exposure modeling of saxagliptin and its active metabolite, 5-hydroxy saxagliptin, as an example, this work illustrates how these challenges can be alleviated by modeling the impact of HD on drug exposure in clinical studies and simulating the expected exposure level in patient care. The modeled PK profiles in dialysis patients were used to understand PK profiles in patients with various CKD stages. The applied pharmacometric approach increased the efficiency of knowledge generation from existing data.