The Financial Burden of Pressure Injuries [PODCAST]

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The Financial Burden of Pressure Injuries

In this episode, Dr. William Padula, Health Economist and Professor at the University of Southern California, and Martin Burns, CEO at Bruin Biometrics discuss the financial burden of pressure injuries.

Highlights of this episode include:

• What makes hospital acquired pressure injuries so much more expensive than other preventable harms
• Provisional SEM Scanner
• How hospital CFOs should be thinking about that math when they’re evaluating prevention technology
• Message to health system leaders who are still treating pressure injury prevention as a clinical issue rather than a financial one

Kelly Wisness: Hi, this is Kelly Wisness. Welcome back to the award-winning Hospital Finance Podcast.  We’re pleased to welcome Dr. William Padula, a health economist and professor at the University of Southern California, and Martin Burns, who leads Bruin Biometrics, the company behind the Provizio SEM Scanner.

Dr. Padula is Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical and Health Economics at the University of Southern California Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and a senior scholar at the USC Schaefer Institute for Public Policy and Government Service. He has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed publications. He earned a BS in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University, an MS in Evaluative Clinical Sciences from Dartmouth College, an MS in data analytics from the University of Chicago, and a PhD in pharmaceutical economics from the University of Colorado.

Martin Burns is the Chief Executive Officer of Bruin Biometrics. He designed and led the successful journey of Bruin Biometrics SEM Scanner through the company’s concept to commercialization formulas strategy. Martin’s background is strategy and operations management consulting to large med tech companies. He earned his MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, where he is a guest speaker on healthcare strategy and medical device marketing courses and his BA from the London School of Economics.

In this episode, we’re discussing the financial burden of pressure injuries. Welcome, and thank you for joining us, Dr. Padula and Martin.

Dr. William Padula: It’s a pleasure.

Martin Burns: Thanks, Kelly.

Kelly: Great. Well, let’s go ahead and jump in. So can each of you take a moment to introduce yourselves and give us a sense of the problem that you’re both focused on solving?

Dr. Padula: Sure, I can start at a broad level as a health economist. I look at inefficiencies in healthcare spending. And I try to think about how we can be more efficient in allocating resources so that patients get what they need more quickly and more cost effectively. In fact, one of the greatest inefficiencies in U.S. healthcare is in hospital acquired conditions. These are things like bed sores, or we call them pressure injuries, infections, falls, things that happen that we spend a lot of money on, actually hundreds of billions of dollars a year, but they’re entirely preventable. And in fact, what we’re here to talk about today is the subject of bed sores or pressure injuries, which affect over two and a half million people in the United States and cost upwards of $30 billion a year. But they’re entirely preventable. And so what I’ve seen in my research is that for pennies on the dollar, we could be spending money on preventing these outcomes and actually avoiding the harm that they cause to patients and the mortalities as well, instead of leading to these negative consequences that cost hospitals money and ultimately cost patients and taxpayers a lot of dollars.

Martin: And I’m Martin Burns, the CEO of Bruin Biometrics. Thanks for the introduction, Kelly. I’m going to start at the other end, which is that what Bill’s described as the problem, we within the company, very collaboratively though, with Dr. Padula and many of his peers, developed a solution to this market inefficiency and to this clinical inefficiency. And what it does is solve broadly the problem of prevention of what Dr. Padula described as a very preventable condition. These conditions are avoidable. Our customers, which are the leading academic centers around the U.S., Canada, Germany, United Kingdom, all over the world have actually achieved prevention where their incidence rate on average has reduced by 93%. That’s on average, some up to 100%. The role that I played in all of that was in leading the company in developing a clinical strategy together with our clinical peers and a systems view as to why these things occurred at all. Why do they happen at all? And how do we then prevent them when they should be, in fact, avoidable? And we’ve done that. So, I have had the great privilege of leading the regulatory strategy, the reimbursement strategy, the clinical research strategy together with a wonderful group of academic and actually clinical practitioners.

Kelly: Well, I mean, you both have impressive backgrounds and expertise. Really happy to have you on the show. Let’s talk about your research. Your research puts the national cost of hospital acquired pressure injuries at over $26 billion a year. And in your most recent work, pressure injuries alone account for more than half of all hospital acquired condition spending in the US. What makes them so much more expensive than other preventable harms? And what does this mean for a hospital’s bottom line? And I’m going to send this over to Dr. Padula.

Dr. Padula: Thanks, Kelly. It’s an important subject that not a lot of people actually think about. Like you said, we spend more than half of $50 billion a year on hospital acquired pressure injuries in the United States. These occur as a result of patients laying immobilized in a bed, let’s say for several days. And the pressure, friction, and shear on their body caused by laying, let’s say, on one side or on their back and on their heels for a long period of time causes skin breakdown. Obviously, that happens. But it could be prevented. It could be prevented by a number of simple steps that hospitals need to take on a daily basis. It begins with assessing a patient’s risk for developing a pressure injury. Are they mobile? Or are they immobilized and bedridden? That’s a key question. It also comes with assessing their nutritional factors. Have they been eating well? Or have they been, let’s say, undergoing surgery or malnourished for a period of time caused by the condition that brought them into the hospital? And so, we need to boost their nutritional levels. Once we assess those risk factors, then it becomes a game of repositioning the patient frequently if they’re immobilized, applying the right support surfaces. We actually have high-tech beds that cost the same price as a Rolls-Royce. But these beds move the patients around for the nurses and for the staff at the hospital. We also have these accompanying technologies like placing dressings on the patient’s sensitive skin parts like on the sacrum, on the heels, on the elbows, places where they’re often making direct contact with the skin to a support surface like a bed. All of these pieces coming together prevent a pressure injury. The challenge is that it takes time from nurses and other hospital staff in order to implement the prevention protocol. And it takes money in order to invest in these resources. Like I said, a bed alone could cost several hundred thousand dollars. And that bet, of course, is reusable. It’s reimbursable. But you have to start with investing in it and then hoping that the investment gives you a return on your money in the long run because you’re preventing an expensive pressure injury. What I’ve looked at in my research with respect to pressure injuries, why they cost so much is because once they occur, a patient is stuck in the hospital somewhere between two and four weeks. They can’t be discharged until their wound caused by the pressure injury is healed. And when you think about what happens in that space, lots of surgeries, additional nursing time to care for a patient at the bedside, and the hospital can’t turn that bed over to the next patient in the waiting room, so to say, that the next patient in the waiting room would be reimbursable. But what Medicare and other insurance agencies in the United States have said is once a patient gets one of these hospital acquired conditions like a pressure ulcer or an infection that was considered avoidable, they’re no longer going to reimburse the hospital for the outcome. And so, hospitals are stuck paying for the bill themselves. This is why this adds up to more than 26 billion dollars a year and healthcare resources. And in fact, no matter what happens, no matter what insurance companies lack in terms of reimbursement for these outcomes, people still pay for these outcomes. We see that payment in the form of increasing hospital rates on a surgery or on a hospitalization. Or on even vending a medication to a patient. We see that, of course, in increased rates on our insurance premiums and other out-of-pocket costs that patients have to bear the burden of. And taxpayers as well.

So, we’re all better off if these occurrences never happen in the first place. If we were able to prevent $50 billion in hospital-acquired conditions, we would completely eliminate those preventable costs from the healthcare system at a rate of 20 cents on the dollar. That for about $10 billion invested nationally in the prevention of hospital-acquired conditions like pressure injuries, we could avoid $50 billion in costs of treating these outcomes. Not to mention avoid the harm that they cause to patients. Pressure injuries, in particular, are staggering in terms of the numbers. Like I said before, two-and-a-half million patients develop a pressure injury every year in the United States. In a healthcare setting. That includes hospitals, nursing homes, and other types of places where nurses and doctors are positioned to provide preventive services, but they don’t have the time or the resources in order to fully implement these resources.

That also leads to a concerning number of our most recent estimate, which is 60,000 deaths a year caused by pressure injuries. And you’d be surprised that the people that we know in public who have died of a pressure injury. One famous example is Christopher Reeve, Superman. Died of a pressure injury while he was bound to his wheelchair at end of life, of course.

Kelly: Wow.

Dr. Padula: Caused by a spinal cord injury. But he actually didn’t die of a spinal cord injury; he died of a pressure injury. So, this is a real concerning issue, and who it’s really most concerning to are grandparents in nursing homes, and patients who are very sick who can’t get out of bed while they’re in the hospital setting. Of course, all of these expensive outcomes, like I said, are preventable for pennies on the dollar. And what we think of prevention protocol costs in terms of, like I said, risk assessing the patient, checking their skin, repositioning them from side to side every few hours, using an advanced support surface like a bed, or applying dressings to their skin. That costs about $100 per patient per day. But it’s much less expensive than paying for the outcome and dealing with the harm caused to the patient.

What’s interesting here that I’ll lay out to you and to Martin to think about is, now that there’s technology, these sensors like the SEM Scanner that can actually detect the risk of a patient much earlier in the patient’s cycle during the hospitalization, we now have the ability to pinpoint the target or basically use a heat-seeking missile to identify which patients are highest-risk for pressure injuries, and do more for them upfront so it becomes a more efficient process of implementing a prevention protocol. I’ll leave you there.

Kelly: Wow, I mean, I knew this was a big issue. But I did not know the extent of it. So that need to invest in the resources is definitely something that we have to focus on. You know, so Martin, the traditional approach to preventing pressure injuries relies on nurses scoring patients using the Brayden Scale, a subjective assessment that has real consistency challenges. So, tell us about the provisional SEM Scanner. What does it do? And how does detecting a pressure injury before it’s even visible, how does that change the financial equation for a hospital?

Martin: I mean, the articulation of the care pathway that Dr. Padula provided perfectly laid out the way that physicians, nurses, and facilities have approached the pressure injury problem. And even with all of the work that Dr. Padula described and all of the interventions that were described, pressure injuries still occur. Now, Dr. Padula talked about the national problem at the hospital level and at the nursing home level and at the inpatient rehab level. What you have is you have incidence rates that can drive up to 30%, in other words, one in three patients developing these pressure injuries. And they’re broken skin. What we’re talking about are broken skin pressure injuries. That becomes relevant because once the skin breaks, costs quadruple, literally increase by four times. So, the goal, therefore, ought to be, how do you keep the skin intact by spending less? In the world of health economics, it’s that wonderful golden quadrant of do less with higher efficiency and pay less to achieve that result. That’s what we do. So, the question you asked is, “How?” The answer is biology. The old way is to try to assess risk, which uses Braden scale. A lot of hospitals around the country have actually dumped it because it’s unreliable to their standards. And there are others. There’s about 97 others of those risk assessment tools–

Kelly: Wow.

Martin: –all around the world. And by the way– yeah. Right. Wow is right. We have 97 of them.

Kelly: Crazy.

Martin: And what they do is they basically say, “Is my patient at risk for a pressure ulcer, yes or no?” Answer, yes, to a certain extent, medium, high, high-risk, or no, they’re not at risk. Okay. So, then the question is, “Okay, if my patient–” I’m going to call him George. “If George is at risk for a pressure ulcer, pressure injury, then what? Where is George at risk for a pressure injury?” There are dozens of sites around the body that the patient could develop a pressure injury. The three top ones are the sacral area, which is the base of the spine, the left heel, and the right heel. They account for about 80%, okay? Now, I mentioned that the answer to the way that we go about doing things is by applying biology. In other words, what’s happening underneath the skin surface, which is where they develop, that you can’t see by the naked eye? And you certainly can’t feel it by palpation, so touch. What we found was over now more than a decade of clinical research is that when you understand what’s causing the pressure injury the way that Dr. Padula described, and you understand the damage cascade that is associated with the injury, what you now know by use of our scanner is that abnormal levels of edema, which we call subepidermal moisture but which the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid called persistent, in other words, long-term, focal, in other words, anatomy-specific, edema, which is fluid ingress. So, an accumulation of that, and here are the keywords, precedes and predicts a later pressure injury. So, it comes before and then tells you that there’s damage coming if you don’t do something about it. That information, Kelly, has never been available to nurses at the bedside. It matters because one of the core frustrations that I’m sure you’re hearing from your CFO clients and listeners and also what we hear from nurses all the time is the operative phrase, you ready, “I’m doing everything I can.” Right?

Kelly: Right.

Martin: God helped them. They are. They actually are under the old standard of care. They are doing everything they can. But what they’re missing is biology. Provizio means foresight. The foresight that this technology gives people is, “Oh, look at that. George’s left heel isn’t red, but his SEM value is abnormal. It’s above the threshold value. It appears as orange on the screen of the device.” Orange means intervene. So, the skin isn’t red. It looks healthy. Ordinarily, the nurse would move on. But the scanner’s saying, no, no, no, no, no, stop. There’s a problem here. Do something about it. And when you take action to treat that condition, you end up with this 93% incidence reduction on average. And in actual fact, many of our customers get to 100%. And what’s amazing about it, and this is where I’m going to pick up on where Dr. Padula prompted us at the end of his answer, is that when you do that, you end up achieving the outcome of intact skin on your patients. You can discharge them in a timely way, according to what you’re actually being paid to treat your patient for. And that way, you’re not suffering. What Dr. Padula and I have both written about in separate areas is what’s called an inverse cost curve. In other words, a very concentrated number of pressure injuries drive costs massively, disproportionately for the facility. And the CFO is going to see that every single month, every month. And it’s one of the leading causes of lowering profitability, and it eats away at your revenue number at the top line. And Dr. Padula described that in a way that only he can, which is very, very educational and extremely instructive. It eats away at your revenue, and it really decimates your cost basis. So, your margin goes down.

Kelly: Yeah, I mean, it definitely sounds like that’s exactly what it would do. I mean, all of this is quite amazing to me. I mentioned earlier, the extent of this issue and what y’all are doing to work with healthcare professionals to prevent it. You co-authored a cost-effectiveness study specifically on the Provizio SEM Scanner and found it saves over $4,000 per admission with a return of $141 for every dollar invested and break even in under a week. How should hospital CFOs be thinking about that math when they’re evaluating prevention technology?

Dr. Padula: It’s a good question, Kelly. I want to cling to phrase that Martin just said in the last question, which was nurses saying they’re doing everything they can. And the fact is they are. But the challenge is there’s variability in their experience, and what they’re doing may not be necessary for every patient. I’ve shadowed a lot of nurse managers in different units across hospitals from Johns Hopkins to University of Chicago, University of Colorado Hospital in Denver. And in every single case, I walk through 90% of the beds in hospitals, and most of these patients have absolutely no risk of a pressure injury. It’s the 10% of patients or so that are in the ICUs, that are in surgical units, transplant units, that are really the ones at risk. So again, you need a heat-seeking missile in order to identify these patients and direct nurses’ attention to do everything they can for a limited number of patients in the hospital when it comes to implementing the type of prevention protocol that I’ve described. That’s where technology like the SEM Scanner comes into play because nurses judging for themselves which patients are at high risk is highly variable based on experience. Martin and I both know many clinical experts, nurses, in fact, who have 30, 40, 50 years of experience. And of course, they can figure out which patient is high risk for a pressure injury with their eyes closed and their hands tied behind their back. However, most nurses don’t have that much experience. Many, of course, on these floors may have just gotten out of nursing school or have two or three years of experience, and they’re still learning. And so, in that learning process, there’s a high rate of variability in their ability to detect who’s at high risk. And they could use an unbiased technology in order to help assist identifying which patients are high risk of pressure injuries. So again, that’s where SEM Scanner comes in is it reduces the bias in identifying which patients are high risk so that then you can be more efficient allocating resources to implement a prevention protocol that I described before, things like repositioning and continual skin checks and adjusting nutritional protocols. That of course takes time, and it competes with all sorts of other time needs that patients have. Some patients need their medication delivered to them. Some patients need help going to the bathroom. Some patients need to have a line inserted in order to be better fed or to have, let’s say, blood or fluids or something else transferred into their body.

So, pressure injuries, I like to say, the prevention of them comes at an opportunity cost of doing other things for the patient. That’s something that CFOs at hospitals understand. But in addition to that, then it becomes a matter of what can I invest in on the technology side to reduce bias, to reduce variability in pressure injury prevention protocol implementation so that in the long run, I can get my money back. Because like I said before, we know that we’re spending $50 billion a year on things like pressure injuries that are otherwise preventable for pennies on the dollar. So, CFOs like to know that if I invest in a technology upfront, that I’ll get my money back soon. And what we see in the research around the cost effectiveness of the SEM scanner is that by early detection of high-risk patients and targeted implementation of the prevention protocol, let’s say if we spend $100 per patient per day on prevention, including the SEM scanner, then you’re saving thousands of dollars collectively on all the patients in the hospital who are high risk of likely developing a pressure injury. And getting down to the brass tax, a pressure injury can cost anywhere from $50,000 to $250,000 per patient because of the types of care models that are required for wound management, and also because of the lack of turnover of a bed once a patient gets a pressure injury. So, these costs add up quickly. And I’m not even talking about the malpractice suits that follow in the millions of dollars. Those are insured, so that’s a different kind of story. But it’s a lot of money.

Ultimately, it comes down to CFOs realizing that pressure injury prevention is a real investment. And then using a prevention technology like SEM gets your money back in less than a year. And so, budgets and hospitals are typically on an annual budget basis. And CFOs know that if they start by investing in SEM now, that they can save money in the long run. And one thing I’ll throw over to Martin is I know that there’s a lot of different payment structures out there for health technology. And SEM, I think, is structured in such a way so that it can be affordable for CFOs and hospitals to afford it upfront and see the return on investment in a quick minute.

Martin: Yeah. Kelly, do you mind if I answer that now?

Kelly: Oh, of course. Go for it, Martin.

Dr. Padula: Yeah. So what Dr. Padula was setting up for us there was a conversation about the affordability piece and how hospitals and nursing homes and inpatient rehab can actually pay for this. And so what we’ve done is– well, what you need to think about is it’s a bit like, from a budgetary perspective, changing the wheels on a moving bus, where you’re sort of used to spending money over there on all those preventative things and then all of the treatment things that go on. And we know what they are.

So by the way, if any CFO says to me, “Well, I don’t believe your numbers,” my answer to them is I can tell you definitively within your budget exactly where your costs are for every single pressure injury. And I can do it by stage of injury because I know exactly from the protocol, your protocol, what you’re doing once the skin breaks. And let’s just give you some examples. Debridement, negative pressure wound therapy, more sophisticated diagnostics like CT scanning, antimicrobial, antibiotics, wound bed cleaning beyond debridement. And I could keep going. None of which you’re getting reimbursed for because, if that condition is your fault, you pay. And then, as Dr. Padula talks about, there are penalties and there are litigation on top of it, which add up costs very considerably. Now, so we can identify from a cost accounting perspective exactly where the costs are accruing to and we know which sites of service within the hospital are actually driving those costs, as well. Now, to make this affordable, what we do is that we provide at least three different ways of introducing the technology from a cost perspective.

The one that we’re doing right now in about three major IDNs across the United States this week is on a subscription model whereby what you do is you pay for a bundle of scans, and we give you a fixed number, and then we give you devices as part of that fixed numbers, which get amortized over a number of years. And what happens is that the cost of deployment is extraordinarily low on a daily basis, very, very low. What it means is it gives you then the opportunity, as a CFO, to view pressure injury prevention the way it should be viewed which is, and this is no exaggeration, the single biggest quality initiative to drive both profitability and top-line revenue protection that any CFO can do. It allows them to be able to do it very, very, very inexpensively. It allows them to identify the cost savings, capture them, and then show the return on investment within a year. The return on investment numbers are– they’re obtuse, frankly. I mean, you look at them, you think that can’t possibly be true, and yet it is. And I’ll just give you a really good example. There’s an IDN in New York that has slightly less than two dozen acute care facilities. And I’ll give some old data, but in 2019, they had an incidence reporte of about 9,900 broken skin pressure ulcers in that year, pressure injuries. That cost the facility $330 million in order to achieve that outcome.

Kelly: Oh, my goodness.

Dr. Padula: So as the CFO of that facility, would you not want to be able to look at that and say, “Hang on, is most of that, in fact, preventable as a clinical condition?” Answer, yes, we’ve proven that. And if it is clinically preventable, how much of that can I save and not spend? Answer, the variable costs of treatment. So that negative pressure wound therapy, the debridement, all of those diagnostics, the antimicrobials, the antibiotics, all those things you do to treat broken skin that could have remained intact, you keep. You’re no longer spending it. And that happens in the same year. So, it’s extraordinarily tangible and real in the same year with an incredible return on investment.

Kelly: I mean, the numbers that you all are throwing down are just blowing my mind right now. Thank you both for explaining that and really interested in that study too. So, to close, what’s your message to health system leaders who are still treating pressure injury prevention as a clinical issue rather than a financial one and where do you think the field needs to go from here? And I don’t know which one of you wants to take this first, but I’d love to hear from both of you on this.

Dr. Padula: Maybe I’ll go first and let Martin close us out here. It should be a clinical issue or it should really be a patient issue, Kelly, because we should, as a society, be able to stop at hearing about high rates of pressure injuries and say they harm patients and they’re fatal. They destroy families. We should do everything we can to prevent them. End of story. But there’s more to it than that because they’re not preventable for free. It costs money to prevent pressure injuries. That being said, what we know from all the evidence that I’ve partnered with Martin and others on in the pressure injury space is that it costs more to treat a pressure injury than prevent it. Like I said before, $100 per patient per day to prevent a pressure injury, including technology like the SEM Scanner as a component of a prevention bundle versus a $250,000 pressure injury case to a hospital. And as Martin noted, they add up to tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars per facility. So, I like hospitals to think about this as a financial issue because they recognize then that if they spend the money upfront investing in prevention, then they’ll save money over the course of a year on having to treat preventable outcomes like pressure injuries and infections, and falls, and the like. So, investing in prevention today is a good deal for money and it should be the way that hospitals think because, if you start in preventing pressure injuries, you will ultimately create financial bandwidth to invest in other things that are important to you, as well. Some hospitals want a new MRI machine. Some hospitals want a new wing for, let’s say, implementing cell and gene therapies for other types of cohorts. You need finances in order to do that. And you could finance this yourself as a facility if you start with creating the financial bandwidth by preventing non-reimbursable hospital acquired conditions like pressure injuries.

Martin: So, I think about this at the hospital level, the way that Dr. Padula just described. And I also think about it at the population health level, and I’ll share a little bit about work we’re doing with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. But at the hospital level, it has to start with the patient, first and foremost, who is there for a particular condition to be treated and does not want to be secondarily injured. Nurses are, by and large, and– everywhere I go, they’re extraordinarily dedicated, and they are trained to treat, and they’re extraordinarily committed to that mission. Their time is remarkably precious. The way that the old standard of care was set up was deploying nursing care in a way that they were doing things that were both habitual and ritualistic, but didn’t have the kind of level of clinical evidence that said that’s actually a really good idea to do it. Now, the organization that Dr. Padula used to lead, the National Pressure Injury Advisory Panel, helps produce guidelines on an– well, it’s not annual anymore, it’s kind of on a once every four or five-year basis– that helps update what’s good clinical practice from an evidence-based perspective. Nurse’s time is remarkably precious. What we want to do is to be able to make sure that any actions that are taken by nurses are targeted, that they’re highly efficacious, and that they result, therefore, in the outcome that everybody wants, patients and nurses, which is to keep patients’ skin intact. Now, we’ve proven that. It’s done we can do it. It’s not a matter of science anymore. It’s a matter of adoption and a matter of policy. So I was in Washington, DC last week working with members of Congress and also with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. They are, as behind this, the prevention focus that we have, we all have as we are. And they also want to be able to reduce population health waste. And there’s an enormous amount of waste in this system.

Martin: Dr. Padula described it at the beginning as one of the most inefficient markets in healthcare in the U.S. And I 100% agree with that. So where we’re at is we would love to be able to have chief financial officers, the people who are held responsible for the budgets of their facilities and the budgets of their IDNs to understand that this is the single biggest quality initiative that they can get behind that will drive their revenue and actually keep their cost structure contained, which will allow them to then do the other things that Dr. Padula has talked about.

The last thing I will say to you, Kelly, is that I despise unnecessary patient suffering and systemic waste, highly intolerant of it. But I’m also wildly optimistic that actually we can do something about it. So, if you were to chart this over a period of time, what you have is an incidence level that is there today. And with widespread adoption, we want to drive that incidence as low as it possibly can be. And in facilities that are using this biology-based approach, that’s exactly what they’re doing. So, my encouragement to CFOs is, if you can’t find the costs in your system, we’ll help you. And if you don’t know what to do clinically, we’ll help you on that front too.

Kelly: Wonderful. I love your optimism. I love the passion that you bring to this topic. Thank you both so much for sharing your insights with us on the financial burden of pressure injuries.

If a listener wants to learn more or contact you to discuss this topic further, how best can they do that?

Dr. Padula: For me, they’re welcome to reach out by email. I have a public email address at University of Southern California; look me up and reach out.

Martin: And then for me, I’m on LinkedIn, and unfortunately, I’m highly contactable. [laughter] No, I love to hear from people, and we’re standing by ready to help. But I’m on LinkedIn. Martin Burns, CEO of Bruin Biometrics.

Kelly: Awesome. Thank you both for providing that. And thank you all for joining us for this episode of The Hospital Finance Podcast. Until next time…

[music] This concludes our episode of The Hospital Finance Podcast. For show notes and additional resources, visit us online at besler.holdings. The Hospital Finance Podcast is a production of Besler Holdings; Built on partnership, Driven by success.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to discuss on The Hospital Finance Podcast or if you’d like to be a guest, drop us a line at contact@besler.holdings.

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