Home Health & Hospice Week

Say goodbye to term ‘ulcer,’ for one.

It will soon be time for your clinicians to learn some new pressure ulcer staging terms and rules. The National Pressure Ulcer Advisory Panel has replaced the term “pressure ulcer” with “pressure injury,” it notes. “The change in terminology more accurately describes pressure injuries to both intact and ulcerated skin,” NPUAP explains.

“In the previous staging system, Stage 1 and Deep Tissue Injury described injured intact skin, while the other stages described open ulcers. This led to confusion because the definitions for each of the stages referred to the injuries as “pressure ulcers.” This will help eliminate “those arguments about a Stage I pressure ulcer because the other person in the argument kept saying: ‘But there’s no ulcer. How can I document an ulcer?”’ notes OASIS and coding expert Lisa Selman-Holman on her Home Health Insight blog.

Plus: “Just when we got used to returning to using Roman numerals to indicate stages, we’re going back to Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, 4),” Selman- Homan adds.

Other changes include updated staging definitions and removing the term “suspected” from the Deep Tissue Injury diagnostic label, NPUAP notes on its website.

Hold off: You won’t start using the changes until the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services adopts them for OASIS, Selman-Holman advises.

See more details about the revamp at www.npuap.org/national-pressure-ulcer-advisory-panelnpuap-announces-a-change-in-terminology-frompressure-ulcer-to-pressure-injury-and-updates-thestages-of-pressure-injury.