3 Dangers in the Way We Treat Wounds Today

Wound care is a challenging specialty in healthcare. Too often, caregivers do not get the results they are looking for. It’s often not for a lack of effort but a lack of process.

As a nurse, I’ve seen it all. Patients not showing up for appointments. A lack of materials making it impossible to deliver consistent results. Patients being seen by clinicians who aren’t trained to treat complex wounds. Finally, patients being treated for 8 to 10 months and still ending up admitted to the hospital or facing an amputation.

These are all major factors in the current status of wound care. The bottom line—we spend too much on lackluster outcomes. Health plans (and their members) are not receiving value from the current system. Furthermore, let’s look at three dangers in the way we treat wounds today.

Patients are forced to go to too many places to receive care

We are seeing that health plan members, on average, go to six or more different locations for their wound treatment. In some cases, we’ve seen that number balloon to 12. As you would expect with such a varied treatment plan, wound healing takes longer, costs more and ends with poor results—in many cases amputation.

Receiving care should not be so difficult. We need to create a uniform process that brings care to patients where they are. That means delivering wound care in the home, ensuring patients do not miss appointments. Moreover, removing barriers to care doesn’t only improve outcomes. It also lowers costs by putting patients in a position to heal faster.

No incentive to heal wounds faster

As crazy as it is may be, wound care centers are not incentivized to heal patients with chronic wound faster. At its heart, the current payment model is broken. For a decade, we’ve talked about the need for greater population health initiatives that allow for less reliance on the fee-for-service model. Yet, we are still stuck with the same reimbursement structure that incentivizes actions not outcomes. This is true across the entire healthcare continuum and is extremely evident in wound care.

Additionally, the fee-for-service model is not good for health plans or patients. By creating a wound care program that is rooted in the effective and efficient treatment of wounds, we can lower costs for health plans while delivering better heal times for patients.

Infection rates are too high

Infection rates among chronic wound patients are too high. An alarming statistic—infection drives approximately 25% of the wound spend. We must do something to combat the ineffective care that leads to increased infection rates.

Looking at Medicare data, makes the problem all too clear:

• Nearly 15% of Medicare beneficiaries (8.2 million) had at least one type of wound or infection
• 50% Diabetic foot ulcers become infected
• 20% Diabetic foot ulcers infections require amputation, 80,000 per year

With new processes that lead to faster healing and reduced complications, we can significantly reduce infections, readmissions and amputations.

We could easily have gone further on this. There are more dangers and numerous process challenges that we need to solve. That’s why Esperta Health is reimagining the way we treat wounds by focusing on delivering consistent care to patients in their homes. Ultimately, the right care in the right place can make all the difference.