Progress You Can See!

Five to seven million Americans are afflicted with chronic wounds (leg ulcers, pressure ulcers, diabetic foot ulcers and burns).¹
The total direct cost of chronic wounds in America, including wound diagnostic and surgical procedures, pharmaceuticals, wound closure devices, and hospital and physician charges, amounts to an estimated $20 billion annually.^2,3 This estimate does not include the indirect costs of chronic wounds, such as lost work time and impaired quality of life.²
Until recently, chronic wound management has been limited to bandages and medications, which can lead to very slow and painful recovery processes, increased spread of infections and longer hospital stays. Faster, more reliable and increasingly cost-effective wound management treatments are now available and can significantly reduce patient complications and overall costs, while preventing chronic wounds from recurring.
One such wound-management technology is called negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT). NPWT uses a controlled vacuum system to carefully and systematically remove infectious materials and other fluids from the wound. More than 1,000 Medicare beneficiaries who failed to respond to conventional treatments had more than twice as great a reduction in the size of their wounds when using NPWT, with a treatment cost that was 38 percent less.⁴ Patients can even use smaller, battery-powered NPWT units to rapidly heal their wounds, dramatically improving their appearance and size.
Other widely-used advanced therapies include bioengineered skin substitutes, electrical stimulation, advanced drug delivery systems, materials that repair tissue (platelet-derived and autologous growth factor) and ultrasounds.
The NPWT technology helps to speed up recovery time. For instance, 56 percent of diabetic foot ulcers treated with a living, bi-layered skin substitute plus conventional therapy healed in 65 days in comparison to 39 percent that healed in 90 days with conventional therapy alone.⁵ Patients with spinal cord injury had their pressure ulcers heal in 13 days on average with electrical stimulation in comparison to 31.5 days for standard wound care.⁶ Furthermore, these therapies are proven to be cost-effective.

Petrie N, Yao F, Eriksson E. “Gene therapy in wound healing.” Surgical Clinics of North America 83(3) (2003):194-9.
Frykberg R, Armstrong D, Giurini J, et al. “Diabetic foot disorders: a clinical practice guideline.” Journal of Foot and Ankle Surgery 39(5 Suppl) (2000):S1-60.
Harding K, Morris H, Patel G. “Science, medicine and the future: healing chronic wounds.” British Medical Journal 324(7330) (2002):160-3.
Inman K, Sibbald W, Rutledge F, et al. “Clinical utility and cost-effectiveness of an air suspension bed in the prevention of pressure ulcers.” The Journal of the American Medical Association 269 (1993):1139-1143.
Harrington C, Zagari M, Corea J, et al. “A cost analysis of diabetic lower-extremity ulcers.” Diabetes Care 23(9) (2000):1333-1338.
McGuckin M, Waterman R, Brooks J, et al. “Validation of venous leg ulcer guidelines in the United States and United Kingdom.” American Journal of Surgery 183(2) (2002):132-7.