How Vohra Wound Physicians Continues to Define the Standard Through Adaptation
The current COVID-19 pandemic has impacted healthcare from many angles, including the long-term care (LTC) space, where dedicated personnel are staunchly protecting one of the most vulnerable patient populations. Vohra Wound Physicians is proud to support this effort in every way possible; using process, technology and partnership to supplement their physicians and collaborative nursing facility teams who are caring for patients on the frontlines of this fight.
Protecting their mutual patients requires composure and thoughtful innovation as they are truly tested in the ability to evolve their delivery model. Vohra is not only navigating this crisis but adapting to how it will inevitably alter the way healthcare, and specifically wound care, is delivered.
Physician Careers
Over seven years ago, Vohra developed a telemedicine modality for its proprietary EHR to expand patient outreach and provide the same level of care to more remote facilities. This has been a mainstay for many LTC facilities long before the advent of the current COVID-19 pandemic. Vohra was thus in an ideal position to pivot across nearly three hundred providers by shifting to delivery of wound care through already existing technology that was tried and tested. The result of that vision and foresight is now the rapidity of adaptation to the crisis through the ability to deliver the same care quality, provider, EHR system and exceptional documentation without skipping a beat. One of Vohra’s many commitments is that their physicians are well-trained in both in-person and telemedicine delivery and a dedicated team provides implementation support to their partnered facilities as well.
Due to a myriad of current events, Vohra is now expanding and enhancing its telemedicine platform, which will bolster its ability to care for patients in LTC while also providing a comforting and reassuring wound care experience through telemedicine for patients at home. This is a critical service that will surely benefit ambulatory wound care patients during the current COVID-19 outbreak and after as it bridges a major gap in the healthcare continuum.
Vohra Wound Physicians has been anticipating oncoming transitions in healthcare for two decades. Not only have they redefined specialty training standards for wound care in the space, they have empowered providers with routine technologic innovation and process improvement that allows for not only standardizing wound care delivery but allowing for the inevitable need for flexibility.
Vohra was the first LTC-focused wound care group to introduce an online-offline electronic health records (EHR) solution long before it was supported through overdue federal incentive programs. It was a visionary realization that in order to redefine and standardize wound care delivery in the LTC space where technologic implementation can be particularly difficult, efficient and accurate data capture was paramount. The propriety EHR was designed solely by physicians who practiced wound care in the LTC space; it was conceived and first implemented by CEO and founder Dr. Ameet Vohra and has been further developed by Dr. Chris Leonard, then Director of Informatics and now Chief Informatics Officer. The company not only embraced but promoted medical informatics as it rapidly grew and transformed healthcare through the adoption and implementation of health information technology.
Woven into the EHR workflow is clinical decision support (CDS), which helps remind physicians of relevant patient factors during treatment decision making. This has taken a giant leap forward by integrating wound data capture with clinically appropriate dressing selections. This immediately triggers dressing delivery to patients within a given facility and aligns clinical decisions with dispensed supplies to rapidly and efficiently carry out patient treatment plans.
Inconsistent internet access due to lagging infrastructure and/or remote settings was a barrier overcome by this novel EHR system so that patients in these facilities could receive the same high-quality wound care through the Vohra partnership model regardless of geography or place of service. The workflow is meticulously designed to accommodate the realities and nuances of LTC and supports these facilities by providing the most thorough and robust wound care documentation, specifically tailored to care plan visibility and regulatory compliance. Paper charts were digitally transformed using highly secure encrypted hand-held scanner technology until most facilities were able to catch up and implement their own general facility EHR systems.
The Vohra EHR was subsequently certified by the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) and is capable of interoperability with the more recently implemented facility systems. This allowed for the evolution of patient pre-registration, which increased care efficiency for facilities and assured patient visits and progress could be accurately and easily tracked. Further, by assuring data is consistent between two systems, interoperability provides visibility of care documentation between Vohra wound care specialists, primary care providers and nursing personnel, which decreases errors and brings more efficiency to the wound care process.
With this sophisticated EHR system comes the accumulation of wound care data that can be made available to patients with the highest degree of privacy and security. This data affords insights into outcomes measurement, providing proven results year after year. Vohra puts this information to use with its LTC partner facilities using data analytics and reporting to guide constant improvements in protocols and highly individualized treatment plans. Currently, augmented intelligence through predictive machine learning is being leveraged to estimate healing times, provide wound progress trajectories and support our physicians with dressing recommendations based on real-time wound evaluation metrics.
A mobile application is also available to patients and providers for utilizing wound healing time prediction, dressing treatment recommendations and access to wound care education products.
Vohra shares its experience and expertise by providing an array of educational materials, nurse wound care certification and a Center of Excellence (COE) designation for qualifying partner facilities. The company has nurtured a massive network of nurses and physicians to form a true wound care community.
During this trying and challenging time for the healthcare delivery systems, Vohra has worked tirelessly with LTC partners in tailoring its delivery model to individual facility needs so that patient care is protected and uninterrupted. The company is fully committed to contributing its part in providing consistent, high quality patient care by leveraging the synergy between technology, process and most importantly, people.