Author: Amy Cassata (Swift Medical) Posted: April 4, 2022
Measurement is the basis for diagnosis, treatment, and management in wound care. The ability to capture wound measurements accurately and consistently over time, and thus understand wound is healing, leads to evidence-based, high-quality care. Conversely, the inability to understand changing wound dimensions can result in inappropriate care decisions, adverse patient outcomes and unnecessary costs.
Why Ongoing, Consistent Wound Measurement is So Important
Consistent wound measurements are critical to understanding and managing wound healing over time. By regularly measuring a patient’s wound, care providers can determine if the wound is getting smaller or larger – essentially, if the wound is getting better or worse, and whether it is responding to treatment or not. Accurately assessing if a wound is getting larger or smaller can be quite difficult to determine with many current measurement methods, such as with a paper ruler. Irregular shaped wounds can be difficult enough to measure accurately once, by one clinician, never mind measured consistently across numerous assessments, by numerous clinicians, in numerous environments – which can drastically compromise measurement consistency.
The Challenges with Achieving Consistent Wound Measurements
While consistent wound measurements are critical to best practice wound care, it remains a challenge for many healthcare organizations – impacting the quality and cost of wound care delivery. Some of these challenges include:
The Evolution of Wound Measurement
Technological innovation has led to significant improvements in the accuracy and consistency of wound measurements. Recent advances in digital wound care have made it possible to overcome many of the challenges described above. State-of-the-art, mobile applications with sophisticated AI and visioning capabilities can now automatically capture and calculate wound dimensions – including length, width, depth, perimeter and surface area – with sub-millimeter accuracy.
Most healthcare organizations that care for wound patients use one of these solutions to complete wound assessments: a paper ruler, a digital camera, or a digital software application. With each successive innovation or approach, the reliability of wound measurements has improved – and with it, the quality of wound care.
STAGES OF INNOVATION IN WOUND CARE MEASUREMENT
Stage I: Paper Ruler
Stage II: Digital Camera
Stage III: Mobile Application (without registered fiducial marker)
Stage IV: Mobile Application (with registered fiducial marker)
The State-of-the-Art Wound Measurement Technology
Swift Skin and Wound is a clinically validated wound management solution with advanced, AI-powered visioning capabilities. This technology fits in Age IV of the wound care innovation spectrum, as it uses HealX, a FDA-registered fiducial marker, to enhance the accuracy and consistency of wound measurements under changing environments between wound assessments.
As published in a peer-reviewed clinical study, Swift Medical’s point-of-care visioning technology has demonstrated measurement accuracy and consistency exceeding the prevailing paper ruler method and other technologies.
The results showed Swift Skin and Wound produced 95%+ consistency between wound measurements. This means that if 5 different clinicians all took a measurement of the same wound with the application, they would all receive the same measurement every time – within 5%. The study also showed 95%+ accuracy in wound measurements with the application.
Swift Skin and Wound can help you transform your wound care practice by rooting your care decisions in consistent and reliable wound measurements. No longer will you need to worry about the inconsistency between clinicians or wonder if a wound is healing or not. With Swift Skin and Wound, you can empower all your clinicians to practice at their peak, gain visibility into wound healing across your population and be confident in your staff and care plan.
MHA will feature a guest blogger from one of our certified partners every month. This month we feature a piece by Amy Cassata, VP of Clinical Operations at Swift Medical.