Catching the vascular problem before the wound ever forms.
Roughly one in five Medicare beneficiaries with diabetes has undiagnosed peripheral artery disease, and the large majority of diabetes-related amputations begin as an untreated foot ulcer. It is among the most preventable drivers of limb loss in older adults — and yet, in usual practice, it tends to go unnoticed until infection or ulceration has already set in.
fewer recurrent foot ulcers reported with temperature monitoring
Lavery et al., Diabetes Care 2007; Armstrong et al., NEJM 2017
BridgeCare LA's Zero DFU Program goes looking for the vascular problem before there is a wound to treat. Participating practices receive the FDA-cleared MESI mTABLET for rapid ABI/TBI screening, and at-risk patients are provisioned a connected foot-temperature monitor from Bluedrop Medical. Once the Bluedrop device records a sustained temperature deviation meeting the ordering physician's defined threshold, the care team routes the patient to a wound care or vascular specialist for clinical evaluation. Podiatrists, who work with these patients daily, are built into the model as a primary referral partner rather than tacked on at the end.
By supporting consistent data collection and care team communication, the program provides the treating physician and wound care specialist with longitudinal patient data to inform their ongoing clinical assessment between encounters. It also moves the CMS quality measures Louisiana partners are judged on most: acute hospital utilization, readmissions, and patient-experience scores.
For a lot of patients, this is a front door into the rest of the platform. The ones surfaced through PAD and foot screening usually carry overlapping cardiovascular, renal, and metabolic risk, and they move from here into the broader Clinical Status Monitoring work.
More patients hold onto their mobility and their independence, and what's left over is avoidable cost the health system no longer has to eat.
Deploy this program across Louisiana.
Talk to BridgeCare LA about bringing Zero DFU Program to your practice or health system.
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