Home health agencies have long delivered wound care as part of their services.
But their workers are not always equipped with proper training or certifications to meet patients’ wound care needs.
The Wound Company — a startup based in Minneapolis — hopes to bridge that gap by partnering with home health and hospice providers across the country.
“A home care company today is burdened with a growing problem of wound care,” Nima Ahmadi, founder and CEO of The Wound Company, told Home Health Care News. “They’re having more wound care patients than ever before on their doorstep, and they do not have sufficient staffing levels in many cases. Very few home care providers have certified wound and ostomy nurses on staff. That number continues to dwindle despite the growing crisis of wound care that they’re facing.”
Ahmadi is a veteran in the health care space. After starting a mobile platform company for care management and preventative health that managed 15 million Medicare Advantage and Medicaid patients on behalf of health plans, he came into the wound care world to become the head of innovation for a global medical device company that is now part of Abbott (NYSE: ABT).
Recognizing the need for wound care innovation in the home, Ahmadi started The Wound Company, which just announced seed funding of $4.25 million from Susa Ventures and Sozo Ventures.
The funding will be used to expand the company’s national footprint, hire talent and continue the company’s mission to improve outcomes with cost efficiency.
“There’s a space missing for a leading company to be built,” Ahmadi said. “The investors that we engaged with quickly saw that this is a problem that is spiraling out of control. There are 13.5 million people a year, by the most conservative estimates, that are battling a wound or an ostomy. We’re spending $46 billion a year when you look at primary diagnosis on claims analysis. And if you look at outcomes last year, we amputated 158,000 limbs just due to diabetic foot wounds. That’s a 75% increase over the last decade. That number is predicted to grow over the next decade.”
In order to aid home health and hospice providers, The Wound Company uses its technology, predictive analytics and communications tools to help coordinate wound care on the spot.
“As soon as a home care provider gets a patient with a wound or an ostomy, they are sending us that information securely,” Ahmadi said. “We are providing either a real-time telehealth assessment facilitated by the home care nurse assigned to that patient or — depending on how much data is available upfront — we can do it synchronously.”
What is unique to the company’s approach, Ahmadi said, is that virtual consulting is not a one-and-done situation. It’s a continuous process that lasts as long as the patient’s conditions evolve.
Ideally, a new nurse can deliver advanced and sophisticated wound care at the point of care.
“In that way, we’re democratizing access to wound care expertise, elevating nurse acumen in the home care setting and enabling home care to rise to this growing challenge of wound care at the site of care where we know patients want to be,” Ahmadi said.
Ahmadi believes his company is a perfect partner for home health providers looking to deliver on more value-based care.
Its home health and hospice partners pay a fixed fee on a per-patient basis.
“Providers of home care that are taking capitation and risk are very interesting partners for us because the economic value that we’re able to deliver them is different than the traditional provider of home care,” Ahmadi said. “When 15% to 25% of your patient population has a wound every year, it becomes even more important that you have a strategy and the expertise to manage those costs.”
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