Wound Care Collaborative Community: Post-Summit Interview With Joseph Rolley

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HMP Global’s Symposium on Advanced Wound Care (SAWC) Spring | Wound Healing Society (WHS) partnered with the Wound Care Collaborative Community (WCCC) to host the inaugural Driving Innovation in Wound Care Summit, addressing public policy challenges related to assuring patients receive access to wound-healing therapies.

Transcript:

Joseph Rolley,MS

I'm Joe Rolley. I am an industry consultant now, with over 40 years of experience in industry, but also, one of my more important roles is the co-chair of the real-world evidence group at the Wound Care Collaborative Community, where I work closely with Dr. Driver and a very special team of specialists. I am very excited about this work.

It is a different organization than what I've worked in the past throughout my career. In industry, I've always had a fairly large involvement in trade industry associations as well as professional societies. What makes this different is the fact that we have government agencies at the table with us.

We have the FDA at the table and we have CMS at the table with us, working collaboratively in solving the problems of access and innovation that we only talk about oftentimes in all the other associations I've been involved with. The exciting part about this is the fact that having the decision-makers at the table with you means that you're going to be seeing action. We're going to see these recommendations. The work we're doing actually manifests in regulations and guidance documents and payer policy, which you just haven’t seen in the past.

Most of what we've done in the past is elevate the issues, but you never seem to get to the point where you're getting action associated with that. That's what's really exciting about this, that partnership and collaboration with the government. The meeting that we had this week identified a lot of barriers that were FDA regulatory focused, but we identified that the payer is still critical for innovation and access.

It's one thing to get through the regulatory process with your product, but even more important for innovation and investment innovation to have a pathway to get your product reimbursed. And that oftentimes is the biggest hurdle that we have. At the meeting we had this week, we did have the FDA.

We did not have CMS at the table, nor did we have commercial payers. And that really is the next turn we have. The projects we're working on today, I think, are going to really streamline the regulatory challenges that we're facing.

We'll be done with those projects. There's a lot more work we're going to be doing beyond that, but the payer has got to also be at the table more than they are. CMS is a part of the Collaborative Community WCCC, but we really need to have the payer component more represented.

There are a number of issues that we've identified that need to be addressed at the wound care level. Our industry is a little special, a little different than most. We don't participate, I think, as fully as we should, and I don't think oftentimes that they are as receptive to some of our concerns as well.

So that would be an area I'd like to see us go more fully into than where we're at today. I think that this was a great venue as well this week. I'm really excited about the opportunity we had here at the SAWC Spring to do the program we did.

We had great attendance, we had great support from the organization (HMP). I couldn't be happier with how things have turned out. And we're looking forward to doing this again next year.

We see this as our first annual and not a one-off. We're really excited about the partnerships we have. It was a really great week.