What Researchers Did
Researchers gave an update on how many hyperbaric medicine providers in the United States are participating in a national wound and hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBO2) registry that tracks treatment data for quality reporting.
What They Found
This is a registry participation report, not a clinical outcomes study, and its main findings describe data volume and provider reporting rates rather than patient results. Since January 2012, the registry captured 917,758 clinic visits from 199,158 patients, of whom 3,697 underwent HBO2 therapy. Among 27,404 patients with 62,843 diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs), 9,908 DFUs (15.7%) were treated with HBO2. Between January 2016 and September 2018, the benchmark treatment rate for 1,000 DFUs treated with HBO2 was 7.3%, averaging 28 treatments per patient; this is a rate of how often HBO2 was used, not a measure of how many ulcers healed. Of the providers submitting data, 2,100 transmitted records electronically, 688 submitted quality measure data, and 300 (43.6%) of those submitted HBO2-specific quality data.
What This Means for Canadian Patients
This study does not test whether HBOT helps patients or report healing outcomes. It describes the infrastructure of a US registry that tracks how often HBO2 is used and how consistently providers report that data for quality benchmarking purposes.
Canadian Relevance
No direct Canadian connection identified.
Study Limitations
This is a US-based administrative registry report describing data collection and provider participation, not a controlled clinical trial, so it cannot show whether HBO2 therapy improved patient outcomes.