WoundZoom: A Digital Wound Management Solution for Addressing Provider Challenges

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Industry thought leader Dr. Paul Kim and Perceptive Solutions president Mark Lacerte discuss WoundZoom, an advanced software platform designed to image and track healing, accelerate clinical workflow, generate real-time reports and analytics, and elevate outcomes. Seamlessly connected to your EHR, WoundZoom empowers practice excellence.

Transcript:

Dr. Paul Kim, DPM, MS, FACFAS:
Welcome everyone to Tech Spotlight at SAWC. I'm joined by Mark Lacerte from WoundZoom, who I've known for several years now, and Mark is a veteran of the wound care space. And he's with a new company, WoundZoom, which has been making a lot of advances in the space of wound imaging and EMR. Mark, I've got a question. Can you just give us kind of an overview of your platform and how it's integrated into someone's practice?

Mark Lacerte:
Yes. So WoundZoom is an integrated digital and management solution that really brings advanced digital technology into wound care. It's designed to improve provided performance and patient outcomes. We're really focused on 4 key pillars: patient assessment excellence, practice efficiency, insightful analytics, and patient safety. 

Dr. Kim:
You know, Mark, it's such a great need for clinicians, as you all know, that we're largely in the United States, we're still using a metric ruler and taking a picture from a camera or a phone. So, our accuracy and reliability of wound measurements is just simply not there.
So, you guys are providing a system and that includes a camera or can you use any camera for this the software? 

Lacerte:
So, with the software you can use mobile devices, it’s available on iOS and Android devices, it’s an app that's downloadable onto a smart device, and it takes you right through the whole assessment process, so managing a patient population through your wound intake, it has advanced imaging in it, as well as the full assessment, and then syncs back to our WoundZoom clinical portal. 

Dr. Kim:
So, let's talk about that, Mark. You know, one of the things that are concerning is some people perhaps who are considering purchasing a device or a program like yours is they have an existing EMR. So, they're afraid of, hey, can this talk to each other? You know, how is it going to be embedded in my EMR notes? How does all that work? 

Lacerte:
So, our application, we have full capabilities to integrate with all the leading EHRs, like Epic, Cerner, MatrixCare, to name a few. We have a team of experts that work with the customers proactively to make sure that we map out all of the integration needs and processes early on so we clearly meet the needs of the clinicians. 

Dr. Kim:
So, it's personalized too, because I would assume that, as it’s customized to the customer, I would assume, because what I found is a lot of people are providing wound care in private practices, and some private practices have all these little kind of niche EMRs. Is your program compatible with any EMR? 

Lacerte:
Yes. So, the integration framework that we use is compatible with not just the leading EHRs but smaller EHRs.

Dr. Kim:
So, to talk me through that a little bit Mark, you know, as somebody perhaps is novice to this area of maybe considering purchasing a software like yours, talk me through a patient walks into a room, what's the next step, and how is your program integrated, and how is it utilized during that time of the visit? 

Lacerte:
So, WoundZoom has broken out into 2 key components. The first component is a mobile application, and that is used on smart devices, and they'd use that at the point of care. So, when they walk into a patient room, they'd open up their smartphone or smart device and they would open up the application and then go on that patient, pull up the patient records, and then manage the whole visit via their smartphone. 

So, what does that entail? It really entails their ability to go in and pull up the wound information and demographics for that patient and modify that or if they're doing a follow-up visit for the encounter, they can just click on follow-up, do all the advanced imaging for that, the assessment, and then that syncs back up to WoundZoom Connect, which is really the brains of the system, which is a wound-centric portal, which enables the clinician to have insight into the encounter from a patient encounter standpoint, so they can drill into the healing charts, the trends, individual, patient-specific reports to see if the wound is healing or stalled, or other  treatment plans they may want to do to that, and then more importantly, for larger facilities and practices, they have the ability to see the whole wound census through our intelligent wound-centric dashboard. So, it gives them kind of a cockpit view to be able to go in and drill in and manage their whole practice.

Dr. Kim:
I think, Mark, you touched on something really important, and I know there was a lot there that we have to unpackage a little bit, but I will tell you that one of the important things that I know of your technology is, and people think that it's just, you're just taking a photo and it's going to measure for you, but it's so much more than that. The power is beyond that. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Lacerte:
Yeah, the power is really around the data capture from the wound intake and also the assessment. So, you can get the aggregate data to be able to go in and look at and track trends, not just for individual patients to be able to track what's working, what's not for them, and visually see it, which a lot of cases, it's improving the patient experience and the encounter because they get more involved in the process, but also from a larger practice standpoint, they have the ability to go look and track trends from providers, which therapies are working, to be able to move away from being more reactive to proactive in the way that they're managing their patients. 

Dr. Kim:
Absolutely, and being patient-centric in understanding what has worked and what doesn't work. Because unfortunately, as you know, Mark, we often, as wound care providers, will throw something against the wall and hope it sticks. Now we have data-driven information to guide us to say, "Well, it was getting better when you were doing this." And then your software and especially your program can now analyze that for you in real time, I would assume, and give you some feedback and say, well, the trajectory is not exactly where you want it to go.

The other thing I want to mention is that the use of our own phones, because as you know, Mark, in this space there have been other companies where you have to purchase hardware, so you have to purchase an actual device, which can be a little bit cumbersome and costly. And, so, what made this jump for you guys to stay kind of away from hardware and stay on the software side in devices that people are already carrying? 

Lacerte:
Yeah, I think it's a natural progression, I think with hospitals and the tight budgets that they have, they don't want to take on another device that they have to manage, not just that they have to manage the device, they have to keep it sterilized and the upkeep and service with that. So, to be able to have the device be more app-based, which is available on a hospital phone that they may have or hardware, because a lot of hospitals and facilities have tablets that they use as a standard of care for other applications, but also to be able to be utilized on smart devices was kind of a natural progression for us, because we started with a tablet many years ago and realized that it wasn't ideal for the facilities. In addition to that, all of our technology is heavily encrypted, SOC 2 compliant, HIPAA compliant, and we don't store any critical patient data, PHR on the devices itself when it syncs up.

Dr. Kim:
Okay. Well, Mark, I want to talk a little bit about your future or the future of your company and where you think the technology is going. You know, there's a lot of talk about generative AI and its impact in healthcare, which I think is here already. Full integration hasn't happened as fast as maybe some people would like. Where's your mind in that space as far as your company is concerned?

Lacerte:
Yes, so I think near term right now it's more about evangelizing what technology is out there for wound care clinicians, because at the end of the day, wound care has been really a lagger behind other medical disciplines with adoption of technology. If I look at spaces I worked in the past, like cardiac and anesthesia, everything's been data-driven for decades now. So, how do we get clinicians in wound care utilizing the current technology that's out there? That'd be first and foremost.

Looking more ahead, I see machine learning models being able to be quickly utilized in these areas, being able to proactively scan the wounds and be able to help, not just from an education standpoint for clinicians, because a lot of clinicians don't see wounds all the time, but also be able to go from reactive to proactive, to be able to help clinicians start to scan and look at the patient population and be able to say, "Okay, this is what's working, what's not." And then ultimately, you're going to get out to AI-driven kind of algorithms that we built into the technology to help it grow.

Dr. Kim:
And you've talked about this already, Mark, a couple times about the analytics part and people kind of that don't understand this kind of technology or where the future of wound care technology is going, but the analytics is the key, because right now the patients too complex the wounds are too complex for us to kind of track in real time. I saw 32 patients on Monday, and it's hard to keep track, because I have a sense of maybe a thousand patients in my head but now we have programs like yours, they can track that. And the question I'm asking is, is there currently available, and I'm not sure this is available from your software or not, but is there a real-time kind of feedback to say, there's something different about this wound, go take another look at it. Is that available currently?

Lacerte:
Yes, you're talking about alerts and notifications. Yes, we have that in our dashboards, where it shows stalled wounds or wounds that may not be progressing. You can drill in, you can look at it. What's nice about the analytics that we have, there's like 50 slices and dices in there that clinicians can go in and look at. And they can customize it as well. 

Dr. Kim: 
Because you don't want to get overwhelmed with alerts, but you want some critical information. Because things that you need to act on more quickly than later. 

I want to kind of finish the last couple of minutes about kind of, and you've already talked a little bit about the future of not only this space, but of your program, but is there anything else that you think should be a priority in somebody that has the ability to make changes like you and your company? Is there something that you've seen on the horizon like, "Hey, guys, we all need to take a look at this. We need to go here?" 

Lacerte:
I think there's a couple things. The incorporation in some of the advanced imaging devices in here, I think is a path we need to go, and standardization of the digital devices in here, make it more of a standard of care as opposed to a “nice to have” to really drive change in the industry.

Dr. Kim:
Do you think, and I've given this a little bit of thought too, Mark, about what ultimately is going to be either policies or reimbursement that will drive change. Do you think, like for example, CMS will say, you must have a digitized picture measured by a device rather than using a metric ruler? You think that's a direction they want to go? 

Lacerte:
I think you'll start to see it evolving in the near future. I think if you look at the recent LCD changes in there, correct measurements was mentioned roughly 21 times in there. So we know the variability with manual measurements right now and how critical it is to make sure that you have consistency with your measurements.

Dr. Kim: 
Yep, well, thank you for bringing that up, Mark. I think it's going to be a more regulatory piece that we all have to abide by. Just like EMR was. It's just natural evolution. The other piece that you just talked about I thought was interesting is integration of other things into a single device. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that? 

Lacerte:
Yes, I think there's other technologies that will evolve in the wound care space that naturally will kind of harmonize together and make a more powerful solution from where we are now. Because right now, we're kind of reactive collecting data. And as we move to more of those proactive models and things that are out there that I can't currently foresee, but technologies that will start to evolve as we start to automate more in the wound care space will naturally start to generate.

Dr. Kim:
And that could also go into remote monitoring and self-assessment by the patient. So, you know, you don't get all these phone calls I think I have an infection. Like, okay, take a picture, and it's a terrible picture and, so, yeah, I totally agree with that Mark. I think the future is integration into a single platform that is in my pocket, that has seamless integration with EMR, that can do multiple tasks including taking photos and measurements, perhaps perfusion measurement, infection detection, pressure mapping. I mean in my mind that's the ideal space we want to go to. 

Lacerte:
And you touched upon something I think is very interesting. You have a lot of, you know, it's 8 million people that have chronic wounds in the US annually. A lot of people don't have access to good care in a facility, they're in rural areas. So, how do we bring more of this to the patient out in those rural areas where they can, to your point, scan a wound or send it into a clinician and get really top notch virtual care? We're not there yet. But we're working towards getting there.

Dr. Kim:
And your company is working towards that, Mark?

Lacerte:
Yes.

Dr. Kim:
Well, I just want to wrap up here, and I want to thank first of all WoundZoom and Mark specifically for being our guest today. I welcome you guys to go to the WoundZoom website and get more information. Thank you very much.