Wound Care Management Solution

The Challenge
What we needed to overcome

Hospital providers must assess and monitor their patients’ skin condition upon admission and during their stay for pressure injuries. A pressure injury, sometimes called a bedsore, is a wound in the skin or underlying tissue caused by pressure, friction and moisture. These injuries often occur when patients have limited mobility and can’t change positions in bed on their own. Hospital Acquired Pressure Injuries (HAPI) are not only detrimental to the patient but are among the most common cause of lawsuits and lost revenues for providers.

PVHMC had protocols in place to ensure that patients with sores or wounds upon admission did not become worse and that no Hospital Acquired Pressure Injuries (HAPI) occurred after admission. PVHMC’s process for these assessments included visual inspection and photographing of patients’ skin. The process was however very manual and created challenges with access to timely data and efficient clinician workflows.

These challenges led PVHMC towards optimizing its wound care management with 21st Century software. PVHMC had experience developing in-house applications and had envisioned a mobile App to aide in the wound and skin assessments. PVHMC chose to partner with Futura Healthcare to develop the Mobile Wound Care App. The mobile App solution replaced the previous process with the following benefits:

• Greatly reduced manual effort.

• Improved timeliness of patient data.

• Increased security for protected health information.

• Improved patient health and outcomes through less invasive interactions.

• Increased operational effectiveness by eliminating process inefficiencies.

• Seamless integration and secure data flow with their EMR.

• Meeting all department needs, including clinical and medical records users.

To realize these benefits, PVHMC determined that it needed a trusted industry partner to help engineer a best-in-breed solution that would make managing wound care more accurate, efficient, and cost-effective.

“Hospital-acquired pressure injuries (HAPIs) affect 2.5 million patients per year in the United States. With the cost of treating a single instance as high as $70,000, and because many payers, including Medicare and Medicaid, are not covering them, the business case for prevention is apparent.”

HFMA - Feb 01, 2021 By Nickolas A. Vitale, LFACHE, and David A. Dzioba

The Solution
Wound Care Management Application

Following regular conversations PVHMC selected Futura Healthcare as its technology partner to help design and deploy an advanced, wound care management application.

Futura’s development team and PVHMC’s IT group worked in collaboration to build the solution from the ground up. Their blueprint was a master list of critical needs, specs, features, and functions compiled by PVHMC that became their roadmap.

The result was a comprehensive, Mobile Wound Care Management App specifically designed to meet the Medical Center’s requirements.

In addition to improving and expediting the treatment of all wound types, the Futura App delivered benefits that changed the way nurses and clinicians measured, analyzed, and treated patients:

• Provided an intuitive, easy-to-navigate, customizable, and adaptive user experience for nurses, physicians, clinicians, and medical records teams.

• Seamless integration of the Wound Care App with the newly installed Cerner Millennium® EMR enabled secure information flow to and from patient records.

• Robust functionality enabled PVHMC to improve patient satisfaction and outcomes by eliminating redundant data entry, reducing the chance for errors, and saving time.

• HIPAA compliant with secure automated user login and patient ID.

The App is currently being used on IOS and Android devices because it is easy to deploy and maintain, has successfully eliminated almost all manual effort, and has been adopted not only for wound care but for any setting where photography and documentation are needed.

"We chose to partner with Futura Healthcare because they gave us the one thing we don’t get from a lot of vendors — they listened. Highly skilled and easy to work with, Futura delivered on what they promised, and that earned our trust."

Kent Hoyos
Chief Information Officer