Authors: Heba Tallah Mohammed, Robert D. J. Fraser, Amy Cassata, David Mannion, Kimberly Weatherly
Introduction: In nursing homes and long-term care facilities, pressure injury (PI) prevalence ranges from 9.6% and 25%. However, PI healing time is underreported, with no standardized expectations for healing or treatment time.
Digital wound assessment tools provide a model for practice improvement where artificial intelligence enables standardized wound assessment that accurately measures wounds and allows ongoing tracking of healing factors necessary to optimize management plans and the cost of care.
Objective and methods: Leveraging the large wound care clinical data in the Swift database, this retrospective study explored anonymous PI data from 48 different HHAs across the US between Jan-end of July 2022. to understand the PI time to heal by stage in home health agencies (HHAs) and evaluate the relationship between the initial size of the PI area and the average days to heal.
Results: From a total of 7,460 PI wounds, 27.5% were healed. The average time to heal stage 1 was 13 days, stage 2 was 26 days, stage 3 was 46 days and stage 4 was 56 days.
Kaplan-Meier survival analysis results showed a significant difference of days to heal when they are compared by initial area size. Overall, PI with an initial surface area >4 cm2 had a median time to heal of 95.5 days compared to 24 days and 47 days for PI with surface areas of 1cm2 and 1-4 cm2, respectively.
For stage 2, comparable results were seen with PI stage 2 surface area of <1 cm2 was significantly associated with the likelihood of faster healing with a median of 11 days compared to 21 days for 1-4 cm2 and 25 days for >4 cm2.
So, when comparing our average healing time for stage 2 lesions to the reported days to heal in the literature, we found that with the digital tool, the average time to heal PI stage 2 lesions with a surface area less than 1 cm2 was 67% faster, for 1-4 cm2 was 60% faster and 66% faster for larger lesions.
Adopting digital wound care technology for faster healing of pressure injuries can reduce patients’ pain and suffering and improves the quality of care.
To learn more about the research conducted in this poster, or to speak with the Swift Medical team about digital wound care, request a demo below.
