How can technology help wound care clinicians? That was the first question I was asking myself more than 15 years ago. I graduated from med school back in 2001; but I started to learn basic html (internet language) in 1998. I was fascinated by the internet, and I was already doing research in terms of how our medical practice would improve with the help of technology. It would enable early and accurate diagnosis in patients, improve their clinical outcomes; and more importantly, will safeguards patient safety thanks to alerts on medications, flags and reminders.
I have dedicated most of my medical practice in hyperbaric medicine and wound care. I developed my own EMR back in 2006 and the first thing I created was a table with all the active patients with basic information. Weeks later I was completing evaluations and consultations electronically. It was worth the time spent working on my own EMR. Years later it was re-designed in order to be used by unlimited number of wound care clinics. My main goals were as follows: it has to be user friendly, being used in a secure and stable platform, provide fast and complete documentation, and improve clinical outcomes.
My application Wound Charts (https://woundcharts.app) is now being used by 22 wound care clinics including my own and I haven’t started any advertising. As a physician and medical witness expert in cases of wound care malpractice I knew documentation was an important key feature within the software; therefore we found a way to document a single wound within 1-3 minutes and produce a 4 pages PDF document. The software already offers: alerts, treatment suggestions, provides +40 clinical metrics, progress graphs, “before and after” reports and many more features.
So were are we headed? I are working on some new features!
Some interesting links:
https://bmcmedresmethodol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12874-019-0681-4
https://nix-united.com/blog/machine-learning-in-healthcare-12-real-world-use-cases-to-know/