Mobile wound care - A novel digital solution for wound management

Wound care market and management

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The wound care market is divided into two sectors, chronic wounds, including pressure ulcers, diabetic foot ulcers, venous leg ulcers, and arterial ulcers, and acute wounds, including burns, trauma and surgical wounds.

In wound healing, it is always pertinent to achieve rapid and complete wound healing. When wounds go unhealed for a long time, it can rapidly worsen the quality of life (QOL) of patients and can result in serious complications, therefore, the goal of every medical practitioner treating wounds is to achieve timely wound healing. The effectiveness of diagnosis, treatment and management of wounds are of great importance in clinical practice. The management of chronic wounds challenges not only the patients, but also nurses and practitioners. Geographical and logistic burdens are important factors to consider, due to the insufficient number of qualified wound care nurses and experts available.

The wound care sector consumes a great deal of resources worldwide. Until now, the market has reached more than USD 10 billion, and it is expected to rise over the years and reach USD 15 billion by 2027. Interestingly, it is often believed that wound dressing is the major cost driver in wound management, however, nursing time and hospital costs together make up 80–85% of the total cost.

As health care costs continue to rise and conditions causing chronic wounds become more prevalent, it is necessary to find an efficacious, yet cost and time effective technology for the assessment and treatment monitoring of wounds.

Limitations of traditional clinical wound care practice

Wound care is constantly evolving with the advances in medicine. There is an increasing demand for digital technologies within the healthcare sector, especially now, in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, due to the stay-at-home orders and risk of virus transmission. The availability of a secure, standardized digital technology, helps professionals as well as biopharma companies and CROs to adjust to these new restrictions, and allow the accurate and remote monitoring of wound patients, saving them from the risks and inconvenience of visiting the clinic or the hospital.

In traditional wound care practices, there are several other important issues to be considered, including the precision of the measurement of the wound size, the availability of complete records of wound assessment and treatment as well as the effectiveness of wound management. Conventional methods expose patients to certain risks, such as cross-infections. Furthermore, it is a time consuming and inconsistent method, allowing a window for human error.

Traditional methods require nurses and practitioners to record assessment and treatment in person and on paper. Because of the lack of standardization, the recording process is usually subjective, which affects the efficiency and effectiveness of wound healing monitoring. On the other hand, with standardized wound assessment and documentation processes, it is possible for care providers and healthcare professionals to access statistics and analytics data around resources, material, patient outcomes and other key issues, leading to enhanced quality and reliability of wound care services.

Digital solution for wound management

Nurses have a crucial role in the management of wounds. With the help of digital technology, the healthcare system is able to overcome one of the main difficulties it is facing, the insufficient number of available wound care nurses and experts. Furthermore, remote wound care services enhance the communication between nurses and wound care specialists, offering time and cost saving solutions for effective professional care of patients from the convenience of their own home.

Scarletred®Vision skin imaging technology is an AI-powered software enabling high quality documentation and analysis of skin lesions and wounds. The CE medical device certified technology ensures the objective imaging and secure documentation to define the effectiveness of the treatment. It has the potential to significantly increase the quality and efficiency of remote wound care services. This standardized technology is needed for the accurate and reliable monitoring of the wound healing process in compliance with the highest international standards, therefore it is possible to detect impaired wound healing at an early stage. Leading nursing and elderly homes, including SeneCura and Optimamed, are already using Scarletred®Vision´s technology, in the context of assessing and monitoring their wound patients.

The app together with the platform creates a secure data storage and allows real-time, objective visual documentation of the chronic wound granting safer, improved monitoring and measurement of the wounds. The platform not only serves as a documentation and analytical tool for the management of chronic wounds, but built-in customizable tools also allow extensive and objective analysis of wounds, thus being able to identify different stages of wound healing.

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The mobile wound market consumes a great deal of the resources globally, reflecting on the importance and demand for it. The digital technology of SCARLETRED does not only overcome the inconsistency and subjectivity of conventional methods used in traditional wound management, but also has the potential to improve wound care services via the secure and standardized measurement and assessment of wounds.

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