Post-Acute Care Perspectives: The Future of Wound Care, Part 3

In this episode of Wound Care Wednesday, Dr Johnson joins guest speakers Amanda Linderman, Mike Furr, and Kahlianne Jones to wrap up their discussion on the results and implications of the 2025 Wound Care Outlook Survey and Report. They focus on the future of staffing and training as well as the technology and AI tools to improve the field of wound care.  

Sponsored by:

 

This podcast is for educational purposes only.

Dr Jonathan Johnson: Hello, everyone out there in the wound care world. This is Dr Jonathan Johnson, also known as Dr Wounds, on another excellent episode of Wound Care Wednesday. So, we want you to grab your glass of wine, grab your cup of coffee, grab your water. And wherever you are, if you're rounding, if you're just relaxing, we really want to make sure we have an engaged conversation with the leaders of the field and strong companies based in technology that really focus on wound care. 

And we're super excited to have an excellent guest and sponsor today, Net Health. Let me tell you a little bit about Net Health. They are an electronic medical record for wound care, specializing in software solutions designed for wound care management, particularly in hospitals, outpatient wound care clinics, skilled nursing facilities, and home health settings. It provides health care professionals with tools to document, track, and analyze wound healing progress, ensuring compliance, which is key these days, with regulatory standards and improving patient outcomes. 

And we have three excellent guests today. We're on an awesome four-person panel here discussing a new survey in wound care. So, I want each of our guests to introduce themselves today, their role at Net Health, and why they are passionate about this new excellent platform. And more importantly, why are they passionate about wound care? Let's start out with Amanda. Amanda, tell us a little bit about yourself. 

Amanda Linderman: Hi, Dr Johnson, my name's Amanda Linderman. I'm the vice president of Wound Care Sales at Net Health. I am a nurse by trade with many years' experience doing wound care and was really happy when my love for wound care was able to translate from the bedside to providing solutions to help those bedside clinicians take credit for the care that they provide. And so, I'm extremely passionate about wound care because it's—I think it's just an overlooked specialty. And so, excited to talk a little bit with you about our survey today. 

Dr Jonathan Johnson: Great. Happy to have you, Amanda. Thanks for coming in and sitting with us again. Very, very happy about that. Kahlianne, tell us a little bit about yourself, your role at Net Health, and why you are passionate about wound care.

Kahlianne Jones: Hey, Dr Johnson, thanks for having me again. I work as a product manager on our WoundExpert product here at Net Health. And WoundExpert is a practice management EMR solution specifically for wound care clinics and traveling providers specializing in wound care. I think that, as Amanda mentioned, wound care is just an overlooked specialty and it's so important for patients' quality of life. And I love getting to be a small part of that by creating solutions that help physicians and clinicians focus on their patients while we take care of the documentation piece of it.

Dr Jonathan Johnson: Awesome. Sounds super important, and that's exactly what we need. So, our third member of the panel—obviously, ladies first. Mike, tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at Net Health and why you're passionate about wound care? 

Mike Furr: Yeah, thanks again, for having us. I'm Mike Furr, I'm the product manager for Tissue Analytics. So, Tissue Analytics is an AI-powered mobile imaging application that plugs into most EHRs that actually automates tracking of wound healing over time. So, yeah, hopefully makes it as efficient as possible to make sure that we're getting the right documentation, the right data for knowing what care plans to customize or design for patients. And I think it plays a really big part in wound care. And I know, quality of life, like, Kahlianne was saying, especially within, or for wound care patients, is such a huge deal. And it really follows patients around wherever they go across different care settings. And I think taking care of this one piece can have a huge impact on their entire experience. 

Dr Jonathan Johnson: Awesome, 100%. I mean, I think one of the major issues these days specifically is documentation, specifically is compliance, making sure that our information aligns exactly with what we're doing from a clinical standpoint. So, being able to put the platform together is great, and utilizing a strong platform like Net Health is definitely key. So, glad you guys are on. 

So, wound care audience, what we're focusing on in this episode with our three awesome panelists is that we're looking at a 2025 Wound Care Outlook Survey Report. Now, this examines some of the challenges, the trends, the opportunities that are shaping our wound care industry. The report was based on a survey conducted between December 10 and the 20th in 2024. It included insights from some C-suite executives, wound care directors, coordinators, and wound ostomy nurses across hospitals, outpatient facilities, private practices, and mobile providers. So, one of the major concepts of the report is to prepare providers, industry, management, etc, for the evolving demands in wound care in 2025. So, Net Health was gracious enough to put this survey together, and we have excellent panelists today to help us dissect the concept of the report and tell us a little bit about the findings. 

So, one of the major key findings that we saw or that we focused on were challenges in wound care. So, one of the major challenges that we see is insignificant training and skills development for providers across the board. So, we have our Net Health team. Tell us a little bit about that finding in the survey and what we can do to better ourselves from an industry standpoint and from a provider standpoint. 

Amanda Linderman: So, I'll take this one. This is Amanda. When I think about insufficient training, I really think about wound assessments. And I think about the variability from wound assessment to wound assessment from clinician to clinician and how that ties into staffing shortages if you have per diem staff that's coming in or agency staff. And there's just, there's a lot of inconsistency from wound assessment to wound assessment, and that's where you really have to start to layer in technology to help assist with the inconsistency and help drive the clinicians to be doing the same—the same wound assessment pathway week over week, if that makes sense. 

Dr Jonathan Johnson: Yes. 

Amanda Linderman: Because if you're measuring manually, everybody's measuring manually in a different way, and then it doesn't give you a true picture of the trajectory of how that wound is healing over time. And so, if you take the inconsistency out of it by putting a tool in there that assists with consistency and accuracy, it helps to take away the variability. 

Dr Jonathan Johnson: Got it. 100%. So, we're looking at trying to remain consistent with measuring the wounds and looking at one of the most important factors in wound management, obviously is the size, obviously is the tissue type. So, with that technology, what exactly are we utilizing? Are we looking at different images? How are we putting everything together from the platform standpoint to make sure we're consistent in what we're doing from a clinical standpoint?

Mike Furr: Yeah, I can talk to at least the mobile data capture, and then this really feeds into Kahlianne’s product of WoundExpert that houses everything from there, because it all starts with the image that would feed into the wound assessment. And then, that gets automatically populated with the measurements associated with the image to understand surface area over time and then different colorations of tissue and how the wound might be changing throughout the healing progress. Then, all that feeds into to that comprehensive wound assessment. I know, Kahlianne, WoundExpert really builds out from there.

Kahlianne Jones: And whether you're using, you know, a generic EHR like Epic and you're using a tool like Tissue Analytics to standardize your collection of data and measurements or you're using a specialized EHR like WoundExpert to document your wound assessments, it's just really important to keep that structured wound assessment. Document all of the necessary fields to substantiate your standards of care. And that way, you're getting that consistent documentation of care over time along with your trending view of measurements. So then, when you need to do advanced treatments, you have that path to help advocate for what that patient needs to heal.

Dr Jonathan Johnson: Got it. So, it sounds like we're building a strong subset of data in order to implement into the system so that we can stay consistent with what we're doing. Correct? 

Kahlianne Jones: Yes, absolutely. 

Mike Furr: Yeah, exactly. 

Dr Jonathan Johnson: Got it. Okay. Okay. So, let's take a step back, and for the audience, put yourself as a provider. You're walking into a patient's room, whatever place of service you're at. How are we utilizing currently the platform—and we're capturing tissue analytics, we're also utilizing WoundExpert. How are we capturing the images? And then, take me through the process of uploading everything and making sure we have our documentation consistent with what we're seeing. How does that work? 

Amanda Linderman: This is my favorite thing to talk about because everything has to be connected. So, you register your patients in our EHR, you schedule them for a visit, that schedule pushes out into your mobile device. You're able to pull up that patient on your mobile device, access their wounds, take the image. The image will then populate the wound assessment within the application. And oftentimes, these providers are also—not only are they doing a wound assessment, but they're also doing a procedure—they're needing to do procedure documentation. 

Dr Jonathan Johnson: Mm-hmm, yes.

Amanda Linderman: So, these providers will often take a second image, and our system will then move that image to the procedure note. So, the system understands where the image needs to go, and there's no manual moving of anything. The system understands it, matches it up, sends it directly over into the EHR, starts that documentation, so that that provider then can move on and do all of those wound assessments and see all of those patients’ point of service.

Dr Jonathan Johnson: Got it. Got it. And that's invaluable from a provider standpoint because you can evaluate what you're doing—specifically if you're doing procedures. Remember, these procedures are your debridement, some of these procedures are your ultrasound therapies, some of these procedures are your skin substitute, your CAMPs, etc. So, you want to make sure you're documenting what the wound looks like pretreatment and what the wound looks like after treatment. And I guess the bonus here and what we're really talking about is moving into the future of AI, right? So, take me down the path, team, of gathering the information, having the picture. Now, how are we quote unquote ”teaching AI” to understand what it's seeing and then give us a clinical recommendation? Tell us how that works. 

Mike Furr: Yeah, I think the future of AI is really using exactly the data that you're laying out to help on the prevention side specifically. So, one example would be if you feed AI enough data of wound images that are infected or of a specific etiology or deteriorating in a certain way, it'll be able to understand early signs of when those events might occur to say, you know, there's risk that there could be infection here. This pressure injury might be deteriorating at this rate based on this wide data set that we've seen that's already been tagged by clinicians. So, it's not deciding for itself those things. It's been trained on clinical data that, you know, the best-in-class clinicians have already tagged those images. So, it's just guessing based on what's already seen from best practice. And that lets it get ahead of or lets clinicians see when there are early warning signs so they can get involved early with the patients. It's not making decisions for them, but it's just giving them the tools to make sure they're on top of everything.

Dr Jonathan Johnson: Great point, Mike. Because really, I think the point of AI, I think in health care in general, but specifically for our visual field, which is wound care, is giving us assistance as we move through the clinical encounter, right? We don't want AI saying, this is what you can do and this is your only option. It's another tool that we utilize in order to make sure we're on the right path. Because, again, we can use AI from an educational standpoint, right? Tell me a little bit about how AI can be utilized from an educational standpoint, right? Say we're looking at telemedicine. How is the platform interacting or utilizing telemedicine to really treat that patient that may be in a under-resourced urban community or may be in an under-resourced rural community? How is the platform utilized in that specific clinical instance?

Mike Furr: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is just making sure that those tools are available regardless of where the patient is receiving care. So, if they're receiving it out in the community with a clinician that might be extremely new to the wound care field, they're getting the same measures of healing, the same recommendations, whatever it might be from the tools as they would if they were going into the outpatient clinic or if they were in an area that was a lot easier for them to get in with more specialized providers. So, it's distributing a little bit more such that they're getting the same level of care, same focus, regardless of their specific situation. 

Amanda Linderman: I was thinking about how the utilization of a platform specifically like Tissue Analytics, how it lengthens the arms of the wound care specialists. And the reason that that becomes such an important, important topic is because—just as you mentioned, Dr Johnson—we often see people are in an area where they don't have access to specialized care. And so, you can actually receive specialized care through a home health agency that's using Tissue Analytics. They take a picture, that picture goes into our command center. That wound care nurse that is there—or not wound care nurse, that regular, that nurse, that RN, that is there with the patient may not be a wound care specialist. However, when she takes that picture and that goes into our command center, that command center is then viewed by a wound care specialist basically giving that patient access to a provider or someone who really understands the specialty of wound care, and they may not have had access to that otherwise or they may not be able to travel to a place where that provider’s available.

Dr Jonathan Johnson: Perfect. I mean, I think we're all speaking the same language obviously from a, you know, AI standpoint. And I think really what we need to focus on are a couple of things that we saw in the survey—key success metrics, right? We want to look at how we're improving patient engagement. We also want to look at obviously how we're increasing healing rates, right? So, one of the cool factors of the survey is that the rate of wound healing utilizing AI and these platforms improved by 65.2%, right? Patient satisfaction scores also went up. So, the fact that we can educate our patients even remotely without actually being there is key because the more engagement and the opportunity we have to chat with our patients, obviously the better. 

So, when you guys were looking at the survey, or when Net Health was going through the concepts of the survey, was that one of the major outcomes? How did you come up with that data that focuses on the—the success of wound healing, patient engagement, and patient satisfaction?

Kahlianne Jones: So, everything we do is really focused on those outcomes and those success metrics. And we want to build products that help prove out everything you're doing. You know, you're helping patients heal, and we want to make sure that you're getting the credit for all of the work you're putting in to get those patients to healing. And, you can see that in the patient engagement score and the healing rates and everything, but ultimately, it's everything you're doing along the way to get to that point. And that's so important. You know, having metrics to prove success helps get better adoption of technology. It helps with workforce challenges because you can advocate for the success of your program and staffing and resources and you can continue to build everything up when you have ability to track those metrics but also to show growth over time. 

Dr Jonathan Johnson: 100%, Kahlianne. I mean, I think that exactly what you just said is the point of why we are utilizing technology, right? We want to increase patient engagement. We want to heal wounds faster. I mean, we all know that the field of AI is rapidly changing. You have ChatGPT now, you have Deep Space, you have Grok that just came out, version 3 today, if you follow the tech space. So, it’s—the technology will always change, but I think if we continue to focus on educating our patients, increased healing rates, making sure their wound continues to improve, we're on the right track. 

My question to you guys as we move through the podcast, and I'm super excited all the listeners are staying engaged because AI and technology can be a little bit difficult to listen to, but you guys are doing an awesome job. So, tell me how working with Net Health and working on this current project, how has that changed your passion in wound care? Like, you started out obviously being passionate about wound care, getting into the field, but how has, the new technology and the new information that you gained from the survey, which I 100% encourage all of our listeners to look into, how does that change your passion for wound care? 

Amanda Linderman: I love the opportunity for us to gather and use historical data to help us better present patient care. There's so much data out there, and really data is not great if you don't have the ability type to digest it and use it for something. And so, we're using it, and we're creating really the ability to look back on this huge, huge data repository and go back and say, hey, we think that based on what all of these other millions of wounds have done, we think that this wound might do this. And I think that it just provides a better experience for the patient. And that's ultimately why we're here and why we do what we do. 

Dr Jonathan Johnson: 100%. Agreed. Couldn't agree more. 

Mike Furr: No, I think just to add a little bit, I think that's exactly it. And maybe to pull on what Amanda was saying, data is only as valuable as the decisions you can make off of it. And this just flips it a little bit to say it. Instead of being reactive or overwhelmed with seeing X amount of patients or having to input all this data all the time, hopefully, advancements in AI or just technology in general can present it in a way that it just fits into the clinical workflow a little more, and you're not as worried about putting it in and more about using it with some of the things that we're putting together. 

Dr Jonathan Johnson: Awesome. 100%. 

Kahlianne Jones: And just to add on to that a little bit more. What the survey—one of the big things was technology adoption barriers, including lack of system integration. And you can have all of those tools, but if they don't talk to each other well, then it's also hard to get to the really valuable outcomes. And so, that's something we focus on a lot, and we'll continue to focus on is making sure that all of these different tools can play well together to get you to an easier, seamless end result. 

Dr Jonathan Johnson: 100%. And again, I think everything we do from technology, provider, research, education, etc, should go into making sure that our patients have all the knowledge they need in order to understand their interaction with us as providers, management, etc. And AI, just in the future I'm hoping that it continues to reach patients that normally wouldn't look out for a wound care provider or source a wound care provider or go to see a wound care provider, as well as I'm really hoping that AI technology, this great platform helps to educate other providers that aren't necessarily in wound care to understand that it's important to treat patients that have wounds, right? Primary care, internal medicine, urgent care, where they sometimes are the frontline providers seeing wound care patients but may not understand exactly what to do. And now, they have a resource that we're building where they can look to, “Hey, this is what we need to do,” or “This is the wound care provider that we need to reach out to.” So I applaud you guys. I applaud the team and the organization for really stepping forward and making sure that technology and the platform really engages with patients and utilizing AI, because as we know, it's the future. 

So anyway, guys, I would really like to thank all of you for coming on this episode of Wound Care Wednesday. We always like to have the forethought of wound care, and typically we have providers that are on. And it's great that we have the behind-the-scene tech, sales, operational research gurus to really assist us everyday providers with making sure our patients have what they need. So, I’d like to thank you guys for coming on and I'll leave each one of you to say a couple words and that'll be it. Amanda, why don't you start? 

Amanda Linderman: I really appreciate this opportunity. And really the thing that I would like to say as we kind of wrap this up is don't be afraid of technology and AI. It is your friend. It will, if done right, and if paired with an organization that understands the specificness of the specialty that you're in, it can be something that really helps you to do your job well and supports you, so don't be afraid of it. 

Dr Jonathan Johnson: Awesome. Kahlianne?

Kahlianne Jones: Yeah. And this survey is one way that we're trying to hear from the market and make sure they're building products that meet the market by to encourage you to partner with your different technologies that you use, work with their software team and make sure they understand the challenges that you're going through every single day. Because the more the people on our side of the house can understand that really deeply, the better products we can build to help meet your needs and the challenges you're facing every single day. 

Dr Jonathan Johnson: Love it. Feedback is key. Mike, I'm going to let you round it out, my man. 

Mike Furr: Yeah, I'll probably just repeat one of the points that you had mentioned earlier. Like, if technology can allow us to open up more channels and break down barriers to patients getting specialized care, I think that's a complete win for everyone. Just making sure that when they need the care they—when they need more specialized wound care, they're getting to the right people and they're getting to the right people as fast as they can, so they can get ahead of it. So, hopefully, technology allows providers to get in touch with each other sooner. They have a common picture of healing, and they can get to just nailing quality outcomes with all those tools in mind. 

Dr Jonathan Johnson: Great. I think just to summarize this excellent conversation today, AI's here. From a medical standpoint, we want to utilize the resources we have to better treat our patients. And I think if we focus on that, we'll never be scared of technology and AI, because at the end of the day, it should benefit them. 

So, we'd like to thank our sponsor today, Net Health, and the awesome team that we had a chance to have this great discussion with. This is Dr Jonathan Johnson, also known as Dr Wounds. And I would just implore all of our listeners today to take a step for, 30 to 40 minutes a week and understand the basics of AI and how it can be implemented into your everyday clinical practice. How do you reach a different patient? How do you educate your patient? How do you have a more fluid conversation with that patient about their wound healing? And the more you do that, the better you can be. So, we'd like to thank everyone for joining us on this excellent episode of Wound Care Wednesday. We cannot wait to see you on our next episode. Again, this is Dr Jonathan Johnson, also known as Dr Wounds signing off. Thank you to our panel. We will see you on the next Wound Care Wednesday.