Your EHR might have a wound care section – but is it set up for efficiency and effectively tracking wound progress? If not, digital wound management systems can help close the gap.
Wound care needs are growing more dramatically than healthcare systems can keep up with.
It’s projected that the chronic wound care market alone will reach more than $16 billion by 2027. Nearly 2.5% of people in the United States have an open chronic wound – that’s more than 6.5 million Americans.
Wound care software makes charting easier, reduces costs and improves care management. Assessment and quality control become much more streamlined.
Wound care is an unavoidable healthcare component, no matter the area. To deliver holistic care, even healthcare settings that aren’t specialized in wound care will need to provide wound care or appropriate referrals.
Home health is dramatically expanding to accommodate the growing demand and higher acuity for wound care. Primary care interacts with patients with chronic wounds. Long-term care and rehab facilities need to give constant assessment and care to pressure ulcers. A healthcare facility that isn’t integrating quality wound assessment and care risks major complications to their patients.
But most electronic health records used by hospitals, outpatient facilities and more have a section on wound care.
So what could adopting wound care software do to help?
1. Your current electronic health record (EHR) may not have the gold-standard features of wound care software.
Why would you need more wound care software when your system already has a section for wound assessment?
You’ll find a place to document wound care in most electronic healthcare systems. But if you’re seeing patient wounds stay stagnant, get worse, or reoccur, the system may not be robust enough to reveal the patterns of what’s not working.
- Does your EHR system require clinicians to manually measure wounds? On average, clinicians manually measuring a wound by length and width overestimate the area by 40%. This serious inconsistency impacts continuity of care, insurance approval and more.
- Is your EHR system easy to navigate? Clinicians won’t prioritize details that are confusing or are hard to find.
- Does your EHR system incorporate the appropriate elements of wound care documentation? If your EHR doesn’t make room for wound images and progress tracking, then your system is simply an assessment cache, not a with-the-times tool for ensuring the most appropriate care plan.
- Does your EHR system have easy-to-use systems for tracking progress? An EHR that can’t quickly pull up trends in a patient’s progress and care can’t efficiently help providers plan care. Is your current system forcing your doctors and nurses to chart-dig?
2. Adding a digital wound care management system can be easier to use than what you already have.
How can it do that?
- It integrates automatically into your current system. No need to double-chart.
- It fills in the gaps of your charting system. If you’re missing certain elements in your current EHR, like real-time patient and facility wound care reporting and analytics, this does the job.
- It’s more user-friendly. No more searching for charting fields in a sea of irrelevant options.
- Nurses in the field love it. Need to take a picture? Save without signing to review the chart later? It’s all on an app that can make it happen.
- You can take and save images. When a patient has a revolving door of providers, having wound pictures available is one of the best ways to ensure continuity of care.
- You can capture accurate measurements with a photograph. Wound measurements can have an easy, consistent standard between providers, helping eliminate the variability between measurements and measurers.
- It’s HIPAA compliant. A smartphone can capture the images in the password-protected app. Images are not cached on any device.
3. It helps you handle inevitable patient wound needs without letting them slip through the cracks.
Wound care may seem like a single-department specialty, but it affects every branch: inpatient, outpatient, long-term care–surgical, diabetic, pressure, venous and arterial wounds.
Quality wound assessment and continuity of care need to be in any facility that claims to deliver holistic care. How does your facility currently handle these common wounds?
- Diabetic wounds: About 1 in 10 people in the US are diabetic – and 1 in 3 are pre-diabetic. If your patients are diabetic, there’s a 15-20% risk they’ll develop an ulcer in their lifetime.
- Pressure wounds: In long-term and rehab facilities, the incidences of wounds are up to 23%.
- Venous wounds: 90% of chronic lower leg wounds are venous wounds. So, if your patients have pesky “water blisters” or leg sores that keep coming back, they need appropriate care or a referral. Because of the wound’s chronic nature, these patients are especially at risk for infection and complications.
With robust patient-centric and facility-centric reporting, wound care EHR software can help prevent your patients’ wounds from running into complications. Plus, it integrates right into your electronic health system.
Instead of hoping wounds resolve on their own, wound care software tracks measurements, tissue assessment and gives clinicians images for a better understanding of over-time progression. Without this quality control, it’s hard to see whether your interventions are truly therapeutic.
4. Your facility’s wound care affects your rankings, whether you like it or not.
When your facility is evaluated by services like the Joint Commission, Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and the Leapfrog Group, you’ve got important eyes on your wound care outcomes.
These details aren’t just getting compared to other facilities. They’re often getting published for the public to see. These ratings, grades and assessment findings can have serious implications on facility accreditation, funding, fines and public preference.
If you knew a simple software could dramatically improve your capacity to deliver more comprehensive and efficient wound assessments, prevention, and care, wouldn’t you be interested?
5. Get better results with wound care EHR software that enables better documentation and care continuity.
If you work in healthcare, quality patient care and outcomes are your goal. Improving patient care is often as simple as seeing whether a treatment plan is working or not.
Many wounds heal on their own with little treatment. But how do you know if your patient’s “chronic” wound is being naturally stubborn… or isn’t getting the care it needs?
A good documentation system will help give you the info you need to determine whether your patient is getting better, getting worse, or stagnating with the current treatment plan.
Digital wound care software is invaluable for facilities that have limited wound care resources.
If a patient needs a referral or a change in their treatment plan, using a digital wound care management system that automatically graphs trends can speed up the process. This saves both the facility and the patient time and money.
6. Not keeping up with wound prevention and healing costs you money.
Wounds are expensive–both for your patients and for your facility. The average cost to heal a wound is $3,927. Even the small chronic ones.
Simply preventing and treating hospital-acquired pressure injuries (HAPI) can dramatically reduce your risk of unnecessary costs. HAPIs affect 2.5 million patients a year and can cost up to $70,000. Medicare, Medicaid, and many other payers will not cover HAPIs. It’s also the #2 reason given for hospital lawsuits for wrongful deaths. Clearly, investing in preventing and treating pressure injuries will serve both you and your patients.
Healed patients aren’t the only bonus. You won’t have to divert as many staff hours to caring for patient wounds.
Another way it cuts costs? Digital wound management is an excellent supplement if your facility cares for wounds, but can’t hire a wound care nurse or physician. While it can’t replace the expertise of a trained specialist, wound care software can help essential wound care standards get covered much better than only relying on an EHR’s built-in wound charting.
Wound risk and treatment often aren’t complicated–but it does require regular assessment and revisiting the care plan. A user-friendly wound charting system can help reduce incomplete assessments and rushed care plan evaluations.
Karen Guzdzial is the marketing director at Perceptive Solutions, a healthcare IT company focused on advancing wound care with WoundZoom, an integrated digital wound management solution.
The opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News guest submissions are the author’s and are not necessarily those of McKnight’s Long-Term Care News or its editors.
