Value for Money: Using Bilayered Living Cellular Construct for Treatment of Venous Leg Ulcers

Introduction: Treatment of venous leg ulcers (VLUs) presents a significant economic burden on the U.S. health-care system and payers. The total U.S. annual economic burden of VLUs is equal to $14.9 billion.

Objectives: 1) To evaluate the quality of life (QoL) of patients with VLUs; 2) to analyze the limitations of standard of care (SOC) for VLUs; and 3) to explain how using bilayered living cellular construct (BLCC) with SOC for treatment of VLUs can help in healing more VLUs faster (than using SOC alone) and reduce the burden on patients.

Methods: This is a narrative review study. The search was conducted in May 2019 on electronic databases (PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, and Google Scholar) to find relevant articles that provided information related to QoL of patients with VLUs, problems with SOC for VLUs, and economic analyses (cost analysis and cost-effectiveness) of using BLCC for treatment of VLUs.

Results: VLUs impact patients’ physical, functional, and psychological status and reduce their QoL. Seventy-five percent of VLU patients who used SOC alone failed to achieve healing in a timely fashion, and that led to increased health-care costs and health-care resource utilization. Several studies reported that using BLCC and SOC for VLUs is cost-effective compared to SOC alone. Although the initial cost is high, the greater effectiveness of BLCC is offsetting the added costs of the product during the time period of the study. By healing VLUs faster, BLCC helps to improve the QoL of VLU patients.