Venowave™

Anticoagulants can be administered in-hospital or out with high patient compliance rates. While they are easy to administer, all entail risk of bleeds and may be quite expensive. There is an almost direct relationship between the safety of their use and its cost, ranging from moderate-risk, high-cost hospital administration by injection to higher-risk, lower cost oral self-administration at home. The risks are harm to the patient and enormous cost to the hospital, under BCI, for rehospitalisation.

Compression cuffs have long been used during in-hospital recovery from surgery and have been shown to be as effective or better at preventing DVTs as anticoagulants or high-dose aspirin and more effective than low-dose aspirin alone. In addition, studies of mobile compression devices have shown them to be much safer than anticoagulants.

Symptomatic venous thromboembolic rates observed in patients who had an arthroplasty of a lower-extremity joint using the mobile compression device were not worse than the rates reported for pharmacological prophylaxis, including warfarin, enoxaparin, rivaroxaban, and dabigatran.

When compared with low-molecular-weight heparin (LMWH), use of the mobile compression device for prophylaxis against venous thromboembolic events following total hip arthroplasty resulted in a significant decrease in major bleeding events: 6% of subjects in LMWH injections group vs 0% in mobile compression device group. In normal use, the compression devices used in hospitals have several advantages over most at-home compression devices.

• Up to 24 hours of continuous operation on a single charge for easy ambulatory use
• Quick easy swap of externally charged duplicate batteries for discharged set
• Long battery life allows a full night’s sleep
• System is about 15 dB quieter than pneumatic systems for undistracted day use and ease of sleep
• Anecdotal evidence suggests that steady massaging action goes largely unnoticed by users
• Positive displacement pumping action adjusts to patient body position applying pressure of up to 130 mm of mercury
• Compliance meter can be read on the device