A Proposed Algorithm to Diagnose and Treat Lower Extremity Hematomas

Dr Windy Cole discusses the motivation behind the creation of the Lower Extremity Hematoma Algorithm

Read the entire original article here. 

TRANSCRIPTION:

I'm Dr. Windy Cole. I am the Director of Wound Care Research at Kent State University, College of Pediatric Medicine, and I'm excited to introduce you to a new manuscript that will be published in the July edition of Wound Management and Prevention. It is in regard to the lower extremity hematoma algorithm that I came up with, with a few of my colleagues. The idea behind the lower extremity hematoma algorithm really came from my personal experience in treating patients in my outpatient wound care center. I kept seeing patients that were mistreated - by either emergency room physicians, or primary care physicians, or other colleagues - when they had deep tissue injuries or even mild traumatic incidents of the lower extremity. Most of these patients were older. They had multiple comorbidities, they were on multiple medications, very similar to our chronic wound care patients.

These small traumas, and these incidences, were leading to dissecting deep hematomas that were not healing because they were mismanaged. I thought that we needed to develop a way to identify these patients before they developed these deep dissecting hematomas so they could be treated better, and hopefully avoid the need for intervention like surgery. Unfortunately a lot of these patients went on to develop chronic wounds. So that's really a kind of, “ A-ha moment” for the development of the lower extremity hematoma algorithm.

We looked through what the established literature was to see if there was any sort of treatment algorithm when it came to hematoma management, and we found that there really wasn't. So we developed one based on evidence. This new manuscript, that I hope you'll all look at and read at your leisure, really is a culmination of that work. I'm very excited to bring that to you in this month's edition of Wound Management and Prevention.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions after reading the article, and I appreciate your time and attention. Thank you very much.