Potential for adjunctive use of surgical closure and securement products

Thursday, 18 November 2010 19:21 |

Healthcare Blogs - Healthcare Reflections Blogs

Approximately 110 million surgical and procedure-based wounds are created annually worldwide that offer potential for use of adjunctive surgical closure and securement products; approximately 36 million of these wounds are created during surgical procedures in the United States.

Although healing of all these wounds might be improved through use of adjunctive surgical closure and securement products, it is likely that increased usage of these products will be limited, on economic grounds, to a fraction of procedures. It is realistically estimated that 10%–15% of these procedures would benefit from increased use of newly developed adjunctive surgical closure and securement products. MedMarket Diligence has established criteria, based on interviews with clinicians, health care systems and manufacturers, for the potential use of adjunctive surgical closure and securement products in surgical procedures, as detailed in the table below.

Category	Criteria for Adjunctive Use
Category I: Important and Enabling	Important to prevent excessive bleeding and transfusion, to ensure safe procedure, and to avoid mortality and to avoid complications associated with excessive bleeding and loss of blood.
Category II: Improved Clinical Outcome	Reduces morbidity due to improved procedure, reduced surgery time, and prevention of complications such as fibrosis, post-surgical adhesion formation, and infection (includes adjunct to minimally invasive surgery).
Category III: Cost-Effective and Time-Saving	Immediate reduction in surgical treatment time and follow-up treatments.
Category IV: Aesthetic and Perceived Benefits	Selection is driven by aesthetic and perceived benefits, resulting in one product being favored over a number of medically equivalent treatments.

Source: Report #S180.

The surgical procedures falling within each category, based on specific procedure attributes, are shown (relative values only here; actual values in report #S180) in this chart.