A new kit for imaging bacteria in wounds in a surgical and/or isolation setting is now available on the market. The i:X sterile surgical sleeve convenience kit, from MolecuLight, is made of a novel, optically-clear material that does not interfere or degrade the fluorescence signal or image quality of the device.
The surgical sleeve is now available to all customer sites in the USA and Canada that want to perform bacterial imaging in these clinical settings and enables wound care practitioners to safely use the MolecuLight i:X to image wounds (both standard and fluorescence imaging) in a sterile field by providing a sterile barrier between the i:X device and the patient.
“With the newly available i:X sterile surgical sleeve, our i:X device can now provide critical information of bacterial presence and location in wounds for physicians in the surgical setting”, says Anil Amlani, MolecuLight’s CEO. “With over 900,000 skin graft procedures alone being performed annually in the operating room in the USA, we believe there is significant demand for the MolecuLight i:X to inform clinical decision-making for surgeons needing point-of-care diagnostic imaging about the presence of bacteria. Understanding bacterial presence and location is so important to surgeons and enables them to appropriately prepare the wound bed prior to application of costly skin substitutes, which helps to achieve greater treatment success and faster wound healing.”
“The i:X surgical sleeve provides a great opportunity for surgeons to fully utilise the diagnostic abilities of the MolecuLight imaging device for wound bed preparation, ensuring the wound bed is appropriate for graft application by repeating imaging after debridement and by allowing targeted and focused debridement revision to ideally maximise graft utilisation and outcomes. This procedure provides value, cost efficiency and a high potential to accelerate outcomes”, says M Mark Melin, West Campus Medical Director of the Wound Healing Institute at M Health Fairview in Edina, USA. “The MolecuLight surgical sleeve ensures surgical field sterility and has broad application for all surgical specialties to enhance detection and management of biofilm and critical bacterial burdens that may otherwise remain undetected and potentiate poor outcomes. I would highly recommend that colleagues trial the sleeve as a part of considering what patient cases would benefit from enhanced evaluation.”
According to the company, specific applications for the i:X sterile surgical sleeve in wound care include:
- Operating room use of the i:X including for cleaning of burn wound, for surgical debridement of wounds, for application of skin substitutes and/or skin grafts, and for vascular surgical applications.
- Use of the i:X where the device needs to be shielded from the patients such as in a COVID-19 ward or MRSA isolation room. Instead of performing a deep cleaning and disinfection of the MolecuLight i:X between patients, the surgical sleeve can be used instead and can be quickly replaced between patients.
- Use of the i:X where the device needs to be shielded from a procedure, for example wound ultrasonic debridement where the nature of the procedure causes particles to be airborne.
The MolecuLight i:X procedure (as of 1 July, 2020) also has a new US reimbursement pathway that includes two CPT codes (Category III) for physician work and facility payment for Hospital Outpatient Department (HOPD) and Ambulatory Surgical Center (ASC) settings through an Ambulatory Payment Classification (APC) assignment. These were issued by the AMA and CMS, respectively, after critical review of the large body of supporting clinical evidence and with each body recognising the medical necessity of this procedure. These codes were issued by the AMA and CMS, respectively, after critical review of the large body of supporting clinical evidence and with each body recognising the medical necessity of this procedure.
