Wound Care Outlook: Current and Future Innovations
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Transcript
Hello, I'm Dr. Anthony Tickner. I am the medical director at the St. Vincent Hospital Wound Healing Center in Worcester, Mass. We are a 350-bed hospital with hyperbarics, all different types of services, and we see approximately 200 patients a week.
What innovations and modalities have you been most excited about this year in the world of wound care?
So, some of the new technologies that we're incorporating into our clinic are the 3C Patch from Reapplix, which is an autologous product, which we actually take blood from the patient and we put it in a centrifuge, spin it down and get all the growth factors and the leukocytes from that patient. And that's a new product that's, it's been out a few years, but it's got a lot of traction as of late. It's from the patient. You don't have to wait for it to be shipped. So, it's quick, the whole process is about 15 minutes. And I often joke with the patients, I say if this doesn't work, it's because of you. So, they get a chuckle out of that, but that's one of the products.
Another product we're using is a product from Convatec. It's a porcine-derived placental graft, and it's InnovaMatrix. We've had great results with that, and we have lots of different sizes we can use and we've had a lot of different types of wounds in different locations that have benefited from that as well.
What do you feel is next on the horizon in wound care?
So, what's new on the horizon is finding better and quicker ways, more efficient ways to assess our patients. One of the things that we're using is near-infrared spectroscopy, NIRS, often we've all heard about this but not sure what that is. And that is basically a camera that you can use to assess wounds and it assesses wounds in two different fashions. We can look at tissue temperature and we can also look at the tissue oxygenation. And why is that important? Well, as of now, anything lower extremity when we're assessing a patient's blood flow, one of the tests we use is an ankle-brachial index. And we often know that that's inaccurate if the patient is diabetic or has calcified vessels. And so that's limited.
And it also takes some time. It can take anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes to complete. With near infrared spectroscopy, we can have this done. It's a click of a photo, so it's a matter of seconds. And from that data, we can gather how much oxygen is in the tissue at the time, predebridement and then postdebridement. And what we want to see is an uprise in the percentage of oxygenation and tissue temperature. That guides us in a way that lets us know that that wound is going to heal. It's on the right trajectory and that's been a powerful tool in our system and we've also used it for our HBO patients and our venous leg ulcers and our pressure ulcers and our different types of diabetic foot ulcers. So that has a lot of promise and sooner or later I believe it will replace the traditional ankle-brachial index.
