The board has written off the amount as a bad debt.
It comprises the bulk of the $752,412 bad debts at the board in 2014-15.
The OIA response from chief executive Carole Heatly gives few details, other than that the patient had dialysis over "a number of years''.
Kidney Health New Zealand national education manager Carmel Gregan-Ford, of Christchurch, said when contacted the cost of hospital dialysis was about $60,000 a year per patient.
The cost was significantly lower for home-based dialysis.
The bad debt figure might include the cost of treating potential complications arising from the procedure, such as infections, she suggested.
"Dialysis is a very expensive treatment.''
Mrs Gregan-Ford said kidneys were potentially an "ethical minefield'' because of unequal treatment access in different parts of the world, and high demand on the New Zealand dialysis service.
Dialysis is carried out to clean the blood when the kidneys are not functioning properly.
Bad debts are written off when all means of collection have been exhausted.
They are mostly incurred by non-residents.
Debt collection agencies in New Zealand and overseas are used to chase up the debts.
The main reasons they are written off is if the person cannot be contacted, or had insufficient funds to pay, Ms Heatly said in the written response.
In 2013-14, the board's bad debt figure was $2147, and in 2012-13, it was $30,392.
Follow-up questions about the debt would be treated as a further OIA request, a board spokeswoman said.
