2024 Advanced Wound Care Congress

Conference Registration & Networking Breakfast

8:00am – 8:15am

Chairperson’s Opening Remarks

8:15am – 9:00am

How AI and Computer Vision are Reinventing Wound Care

One promising area in which artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing is computer vision—algorithms which process images. Healthcare entrepreneurs are in the midst of turning this technology toward healthcare, where algorithms can identify rashes and lesions, measure and analyze wounds, and bring colorimetric testing into the home — all using photos or short videos snapped by our smartphones. Wound care is an attractive area for AI because the status quo leaves so much to be desired. This session will explore how AI technology is shaping wound care.

9:00am – 9:45am

Breakthrough Treatments for Accelerated Wound Healing

Skin injuries across the body continue to disrupt everyday life for millions of patients and result in prolonged hospital stays, infection, and death. Advances in wound healing devices have improved clinical practice but have mainly focused on treating macroscale healing versus underlying microscale pathophysiology. Consensus is lacking on optimal treatment strategies using a spectrum of wound healing products, which has motivated the design of new therapies. This session will explore advances in the development of novel drug, biologic products, and biomaterial therapies for wound healing for marketed therapies and those in clinical trials. We will also discuss perspectives for successful and accelerated translation of novel integrated therapies for wound healing.

9:45am – 10:15am

Networking & Refreshments Break

10:15am – 11:00am

Disparities in Access to Wound Care: Strategies for Improving Access and Reducing Costs

Access to quality healthcare is not equal. As much as healthcare leaders would like to think that there is equal access to healthcare in the U.S., it is far from true. Depending on where someone lives, how much money they have and their education level, outcomes are dramatically different. When we take a closer look, the same is true for wound care. It comes down to the social determinants of health. It has been a buzz word in healthcare circles for the past few years, and it is certainly relevant when it comes to wound care. Just promoting healthy choices won’t eliminate these and other health disparities. Instead, public health organizations and their partners in sectors like education, transportation, and housing need to take action to improve the conditions in people’s environments. It all comes down to removing barriers to wound care, ensuring that patients receive the right care at the right time in the right place. Not only is that a boost for patient outcomes, but it comes with a financial benefit for health plans. Topics to be discussed will include:

• Improving access to care, regardless of geography
• Bringing wound care into the home
• Delivering consistent quality of wound care

11:00am – 11:45am

The Importance of Interdisciplinary Teamwork in Wound Rounds and Assessment

Wound healing is a multi-step, ever-changing process that requires ongoing care and attention by a variety of care providers. Two critical components of wound healthcare are wound rounds and assessments, which typically occur each week. During rounds, care providers observe and discuss each patient’s condition and strategize continuing care. Providers also conduct wound assessments, which involve classifying wounds based on criteria such as size and tissue type in order to evaluate the healing process. Rounds and assessment are essential components of effective wound care, and their effectiveness is dependent upon interdisciplinary teamwork. This session will discuss all this and more on why interdisciplinary teamwork is important in wound rounds and assessment.

11:45am – 12:30pm

Optimizing the Wound Care Service Line

Gain insights on how to optimize your wound care service line, including:

– Proper metrics and KPIs for understanding and managing home wound care delivery

– Analysis and improvement of supply selection and usage processes, including negotiations with existing and new product vendors

– Training and empowerment of clinical managers and staff in clinically effective product selection that could reduce excess visits and dressing changes

12:30pm – 1:30pm

Luncheon

1:30pm – 2:15pm

Telemedicine as a Wound Care Solution

Telemedicine provides a convenient way to get the care you need without traveling to the doctor or specialist you need. Virtual care, or telehealth, has been around for a while, but recent changes in healthcare have caused telemedicine services to surge. In the past, telemedicine visits were used primarily as urgent care encounters. If you had symptoms of a cold, you could chat with a tel-a-doc and maybe get antibiotics. Today, telemedicine services have expanded. And patients can see their telemedicine doctor for gynecologic, primary and even wound care. This session will explore how telemedicine has become a solution for patients with chronic or non-healing wounds.

2:15pm – 3:15pm

Panel: Wound Care Treatment – The Importance of Collaboration

Often when patients come in for chronic wound care treatment, the wound is not the only issue they need to address. An entire host of complications can cause a wound, which means patients need several medical professionals working together to understand how to treat the underlying condition that prevents a wound to heal completely. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, doctors formulate a comprehensive treatment plan to help their patients heal as quickly as possible. Topics to be discussed will include:

• What is collaborative treatment?
• The silo mentality
• Integrating new treatment modalities
• Bringing in outside help

3:15pm – 3:45pm

Networking & Refreshments Break

3:45pm – 4:30pm

Technological Advances in the Management of Chronic Wounds

Wound treatment comprises a substantial portion of the healthcare budgets. Studies suggest that about 50% of patients admitted to hospitals have wounds, while 1%−2% of the general population in the suffers from chronic wounds. Chronic wounds fail to repair themselves within the expected period of 30 days. Technologies have been developed to address challenges encountered during wound care with the aim of alleviating pain, promoting healing, or controlling wound infections. This session will explore the technological improvements that have been made in this field over time.

4:30pm – 5:15pm

Complex Wound Management

Wound healing is a critical physiological process to maintain the integrity of the skin as a mechanical barrier after trauma. It can be generally divided into hemostatic, inflammatory, proliferative and remodeling phases. Complex wounds classically arrest in the inflammatory phase without further progression. Many factors can lead to this, including poor systemic conditions or poor local tissue environments such as vascular compromise or infection. Proper understanding of the healing process is essential when addressing any complex wound. This session will explore the evaluation and treatment of complex wounds and highlight the importance of the interprofessional team approach when evaluating patients with this condition. Topics to be discussed will include:

• Basic concepts of wound healing and factors that affect the healing process
• How to evaluate patients presenting with complex wounds
• The current practice in the treatment of complex wounds
• The management by an interprofessional team in dealing with complex wounds.

5:15pm

End of Day One

Networking Breakfast

8:00am – 8:15am

Chairperson’s Remarks

8:15am – 9:00am

A Global Perspective on Wound Care

The development of an interprofessional team approach to the care of acute and chronic wounds is a worldwide challenge. This global unmet need has recently been recognized by the World Health Organization and addressed by the Association for the Advancement of Wound Care Global Volunteers program. This session will provide an overview of the escalating international wound problem and explore current programs established to deal with wounds in resource-poor countries.

9:00am – 9:45am

An Approach to Wound Care in the Urgent Care Setting

The skin is the largest organ in the human body. In simplest terms, its primary function is to protect the delicate insides from the harsh external environment. Injury to (or a defect in) the skin is not a cause for alarm in most cases, as this particular organ has a remarkable ability to regenerate itself. The goal of treatment is to maximize the healing potential of the skin and to create a “neoskin” to recreate the protective function until the original tissue has healed. Equally important is to employ techniques, products and activities that promote healing as opposed to inhibiting it. Unfortunately, many of those activities commonly performed in the name of “wound healing promoting” are in fact “wound healing inhibiting. This session will familiarize practitioners in the urgent care setting with the general principles of managing common and less common wounds and describe common pitfalls, with an emphasis on cleaning and dressing of wounds appropriate for treatment there.

9:45am – 10:15am

Networking & Refreshments Break

10:15am – 11:00am

Palliative Wound Care: Closing the Gap

In the palliative wound care pathway, the focus shifts toward providing patient comfort and dignity, preventing wound infection and deterioration, averting hospitalizations, and improving overall patient quality of life. Evidence shows that palliative care increases patients’ overall satisfaction with the care they receive. Palliative care also decreases the need for trips to the emergency department and hospitalizations, thus, reduces health care costs. This session will explore when to employ palliative care and key components of palliative wound management

11:00am – 11:45am

What’s New in Wound Care

Chronic and nonhealing wounds are a worldwide issue and are becoming more difficult to treat. In the United States alone, over eight million Americans have chronic wounds that cost the national health care system between $18 and $96 billion per year. If standard treatment does not adequately heal a wound, additional methods of wound care treatment may be required, and the underlying disorder must be examined to determine the need for advanced wound care modalities. Advanced wound care therapies are interventions that are used after standard wound care has failed. The development of a wide range of advanced wound care therapies with varying compositions and indications has increased recently in tandem with the acceleration of chronic wound complications. This session will explore these advanced wound care therapies.

11:45am – 12:30pm

Doing the Right Thing: Ethics and Wound Care

When treating patients with chronic wounds, clinicians often face situations that require application of ethical principles, such as the decision regarding when palliative care should be initiated, or when a wound should be classified as “nonhealable” or “maintenance” based on their ability to heal. Topics in this session to be discussed will include:

• Overview of principles of ethics: beneficence, nonmaleficence, autonomy and justice

• Ethical principles and dilemmas in wound care
• A practical approach to applying principles of ethics in wound care and solving dilemmas

12:30pm

Conference Concludes

Workshop: How to Increase Patient Load, Revenues and Reimbursements for Your Wound Care or Hyperbaric Medicine Clinic Business

This workshop is for clinic managers, administrators, billers/coders, and medical directors who want to learn how to:

– Manage revenue cycle to meet (and exceed) budget goals

– Discover patient revenue left on the table due to incorrect medical coding

– Meet and exceed budget goals

– Increase patient load

– Become a profit center for the hospital (and keep your clinic doors open!)

– And ultimately lower your own stress levels