Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). Your first question comes from the line of Michael Matson from Wachovia Capital Markets.
Michael Matson - Wachovia Capital Markets
I was wondering if you could give us a little more detail on the commentary in the press release about the days of use of the V.A.C. declining; I just want to understand what’s going on there and why the hospitals feel that they can use the product for fewer days per patient?
Catherine M. Burzik
Consistent with what we talked about in Q3 a lot of this time that a V.A.C. is on a person has to do with the mix of wounds, and during Q3 we talked about the length of therapy, during that call. What we saw during Q4 was really more of a stabilization in the overall length of therapy as we believe that we saw a more balanced mix between acute wounds and chronic wounds in the acute care setting.
Michael Matson - Wachovia Capital Markets
With regards to the tech assessment that CMS is going to be doing for negative pressure wound therapy, can you walk us through your thought process there and sort of highlight the best and worst case outcomes?
Catherine M. Burzik
For those of you on the call that aren’t really familiar with this process, this is totally in keeping with the MIPPA Legislation, the Medicare Improved Patient Performance Act that we were all part of getting passed during this summertime, and as part of that we had worked to request specifically that there be a relook at the coding associated with negative pressure wound therapy. So, Medicare initiated that relook through a company that’s called ECRI that is involved with looking at the tech assessment. We have provided, or are in the process actually, of providing to ECRI all of our clinical and technical evidence associated with V.A.C. therapy and why V.A.C. therapy works. I actually am very pleased with the document that ECRI came out with which encouraged people to come forward with a lot of different clinical evidence associated with the effectiveness of V.A.C. So we will work proactively with them. We assume then that they will write a report and that report will go to Medicare. Certainly one outcome is, and we would be optimistic that we could get there is that, our negative pressure wound therapy would be put in a separate class or separate code from the E2402 code which is for wound drainage devices, that we will be separated in that regard, that would be a good outcome. Another outcome could be that we keep all of the products in the same code and as a result of that then competitive bidding would just continue as it had been.
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