Is a Low-Cost Drill Cover System Noninferior to Conventional Surgical Drills for Skeletal Traction Pin Placement?

The Drill Cover system was developed as a low-cost alternative to conventional surgical drills with specific applicability to low- and middle-income countries. However, the system may also be useful for the sterile placement of traction pins in the emergency department of high-income country hospitals. In September 2019, a US-based Level-1 trauma center began using the Drill Cover system to apply skeletal traction pins in patients with femoral shaft fractures. With these data, we performed a retrospective interrupted time series study to determine if the Drill Cover system was noninferior to conventional surgical drills in terms of infections at the traction pin site. The study included 205 adult patients with femoral shaft fractures initially placed in skeletal traction using a conventional surgical drill (n = 150, preintervention group) or the Drill Cover system (n = 55, postintervention group). The primary outcome was an infection at the site of skeletal traction pin placement that required surgery or antibiotics, which was compared between groups using a noninferiority test with a 1-sided alpha of 0.05 and a noninferiority margin of 3%. No infections at the site of skeletal traction pin placement were found in either the preintervention or the postintervention group (difference, 0%; 95% confidence interval: 0.0%-1.4%; noninferiority P value < 0.01). The results suggest that the Drill Cover system was noninferior to conventional surgical drills regarding infections at the site of skeletal traction pins. The Drill Cover system may be a safe alternative to the more expensive surgical drills for skeletal traction pin placement in the emergency room environment.