Key Takeaways

• Digital wound care management (home-based care): Study included 12,000 patients and >45,000 wounds; consistent, accurate documentation increased wound visibility for specialists across clinicians, organizations, and care settings.
• Clinical management: Earlier wound visibility supported interventions including dressing changes, antibiotics, infection identification, supply review, and specialist guidance in real time; improved healing rates were reported for pressure injuries and diabetic wounds.
• Care coordination: Digital monitoring can identify needs for staff/patient education, dietitian or social services involvement, provider intervention, adequate supplies, or inpatient care, supporting multidisciplinary management across wound populations.

Please note: This content is a direct transcript, capturing the authentic conversation without edits. Some language may reflect the flow of live discussion rather than polished text. 

Transcript

Hi, my name is Amy Cassata. I'm a BSN, RN, and I'm wound care certified. I'm currently the chief nursing officer of SWIFT Medical. 

I think looking at across the 12,000 patients in the study and the more than 45,000 wounds that we looked at, the consistency and accuracy across all the clinicians utilizing the solution, the digital wound care management solution, allows that visibility and the consistency to have the wound care specialist review the documentation. Earlier insights, earlier visibility into the wounds allow greater impact, whether that impact is changing a dressing, earlier intervention of antibiotics, whether that is appropriate dressings. When you start having that visibility across multiple organizations, multiple settings, you start seeing improved outcomes. 

I would look at it from correlation to causation. Influencing is a strong word. What we bring is greater visibility into that patient and those wounds specifically for that patient. In a home-based care setting, the specialist may not be the one that's in the home providing that day-to-day care. So how can I, as the wound care specialist, help any nurse that's in the field? What we look at is providing that visibility and that transparency for all the clinicians, regardless of their education level, that are in the home. So if I can take my wealth of knowledge or my colleagues' wealth of knowledge and help those clinicians in the field, we start seeing improved outcomes, providing them guidance in real time. We also look at the supplies that they're using or the dressings that they're using. How do we identify early infection? Our goal is to make sure that the patient is having the best outcome with their wounds in whatever their home setting is. So by using a digital wound care solution, it provides that visibility and the support for the clinician in the home, the patient in the home, and ultimately the organization to support them holistically. 

You can't—I like to say this a lot—you can't monitor what you can't measure, right? So historically, when you're supporting wounds in a home-based care setting you don't have that full visibility and full transparency to support it. It's a phone call. Unfortunately, sometimes it's a quick picture that gets sent inappropriately to a provider to help guide them. What we look at is how are we guiding that transparency across the organization? Which nurses need re-education? Which patients need re-education? Maybe it’s getting a dietician involved. Maybe it's a social service worker involved because of their home-based setting is not appropriate or conducive for healing. Maybe it's they don't have the adequate supplies in their home-based care setting. So how can the transparency of looking at a wound population, not the patient population, but that wound population across many of these home care–based settings is to provide them that visibility. 

Also, when you're looking at it, it's where education do I need? Maybe we see improved healing rates, right? Like in this study, the improved healing rates on the pressure injuries and the diabetic. What additional education was provided to those staff? Not only the licensed staff, but the certified staff as well. Those CNAs going into the home. How are they identifying those injuries at the time that they're being identified or they found two weeks later? Maybe it's the reeducation with the provider or looking at some of those best case settings, or maybe it is intervention that they do need to go in an inpatient setting. By using the digital wound care management solutions, it gives them full visibility across their patient population. So whether it's a social service intervention, whether it's a dietary intervention, a provider intervention, an education intervention, if you can't see what's going on in your patient population, you can't really measure the outcomes that you want to achieve.