The implementation of wound care protocols varies greatly based on the operational and technologic sophistication of a skilled nursing facility. There are contributing factors to the existing division in the long-term care space which include external pressure for rapid streamlining, data provision and cost-cutting measures. These factors can create barriers to the implementation of any system. However, with each obstacle there is opportunity. An effective strategy may range from almost exclusively human resource and process management to almost exclusively data interoperability, technology and innovation with actionable deliverables. The Vohra Wound Care Partnership Program aims to address concerns and improve outcomes. There are several benefits of the program that are dependent on these several major factors:

Business Development, Medical Affairs and Clinical Operations

• Governs selection criteria on which patients receive a Vohra Wound Physician consultation on admission or during their stay
• Imposes standardization and objectivity on the implementation and maintenance of the Vohra wound care program
• Attempts to eliminate and demonstrate a degree of unacceptability to variations and unknowns in the wound care consultation process
• Concurrent to the ongoing operational improvements required to implement the pilot, the value of interoperability and data sharing becomes completely obvious as does the client facility’s information and data flow redundancy, unjustified variability and unnecessary steps in data transfer and totally inappropriate and error-prone methods of data capture and reconciliation
• Exposes behavioral and operational obstacles to the patient procurement process and attempts to mitigate or eliminate them
• Creates cohesiveness and touch points between Vohra and corporate/facility client personnel
• Identifies operational issues that can be addressed from the perspective of a partnership rather than a potentially adversarial investigative scenario
• All the above pose significant exposure as well as contributing greatly to many clinician-facility issues that waste Vohra overhead with conjecture and discovery while attempting to mediate

Informational

• Attempts to expand and standardize all captured data across the national practice to increase validity
• Superior ability to compare facility and clinician data and outcomes
• Superior ability to analyze utilization behavior, practice patterns and effects of interventions
• Superior landscape to pull data and incorporate it into the development of a proprietary predictive scoring tool
• Earlier and more impactful and preventive interventions
• Makes the case for investing and/or helping to facilitate interoperability with facility EHR vendors extremely obvious (from both a data integrity and an efficiency perspective)

Economic and Revenue

• Allocates specialty provider resources to the patient population with the most need, maximizing healthcare value
• Variable rise in scope of care – newly procured consults
• Variable rise in acuity – nature of any newly procured consults
• Pre-pilot utilization data compared with post-implementation data at various stages of the program yield a significant scope of information (consults previously in “blind-spot”)
• Ultimately shifts and increases the proportion of visits to initial visits and encounters with justifiably stronger alignment with true medical necessity
• A standardizing methodology is essential for the leverage of data and outcomes in expanding referral and payer sources

Marketing

• Raises the level of expectation across the Vohra-client partnership
• Recognizes facilities for making efforts to build and/or enhance their wound care program
• Recognizes high-performing individuals within partnering facilities, enhances cooperation and transparent feedback and creates advocacy rather than complacency
• Aligned with Vohra’s expanding offerings of wound care education, wound care recognition and accreditation and the Centers of Excellence Program
• Increases the sophistication of the wound care program to potential corporate clients who increasingly understand their need for data and innovation within key areas of their space at low cost
• Pilot programs, innovative and low-cost provider/technologic-based approaches and the provision of actionable data is an increasingly recognized value proposition to procure higher acuity wound care patients for aggressive corporate client partners
• The cooperative and synergistic partnership with a niche-expert hybrid provider/vendor to bolster a weak wound care program presents a new way to approach potential clients at both the facility and corporate level where there is not a disconnect between them that often introduces severability of the relationship
• Furthering the company’s place as the premier wound care delivery program within the long-term care space

With the rapidly changing healthcare landscape, our client skilled nursing facilities will have the opportunity to stay up-to-date on technologic and wound care advancements through our program. With legality and protocol being at the front-line, outcomes and measurable deliverables are the mission and assurance that these standards require constant dynamic adjustment, in which Vohra is uniquely positioned to support.

To learn more about our Wound Care program, visit here.