Cost of Treating Pressure Ulcers for Veterans with Spinal Cord Injury

Stroupe KT, Manheim LM, Evans (Mayfield) C, Guihan M, Ho C, Li K, Cowper Ripley DC, Hogan TP, St. Andre JR, Huo Z, Smith BM. Cost of Treating Pressure Ulcers for Veterans with Spinal Cord Injury. Topics in spinal cord injury rehabilitation. 2011 Apr 1; 16(4):62-73.

Related HSR&D Project(s)

• IIR 07-188 – Health Care Use and Costs of Veterans with Neurotrauma

Dimensions for VA is a web-based tool available to VA staff that enables detailed searches of published research and research projects.

If you have VA-Intranet access, click here for more information vaww.hsrd.research.va.gov/dimensions/

VA staff not currently on the VA network can access Dimensions by registering for an account using their VA email address.    Search Dimensions for VA for this citation
* Don't have VA-internal network access or a VA email address? Try searching the free-to-the-public version of Dimensions

Search for Abstract from PubMed

---

Abstract:

Veterans comprise almost 17% of the 250,000 persons with spinal cord injury/disorder (SCI/D) in the United States. Pressure ulcers are common complications of SCI/D. We compared annual healthcare utilization and costs between Veterans with and without pressure ulcers in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). Veterans with pressure ulcers had more total inpatient days on average (61.00 vs. 9.19; P < 0.001) and higher total healthcare costs ($100,935 vs. $27,914; P < 0.001) due primarily to higher inpatient costs ($91,341 vs. $13,754; P < 0.05). Our results highlight the need to identify patients at risk for pressure ulcers who could benefit from targeted skin care management interventions.