The Problem we are tackling

Surgical site infections (SSI) are a not uncommon (2-14%) (ref 1)of the surgeries in USA. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that approximately 500,000 SSIs occur annually in the United States(ref 2) Overall, SSIs may result in $1–$10 billion in direct and indirect medical costs each year(ref 2). Not to mention the suffering and waste of time.
Costs of Surgical Site Infections That Appear after Hospital Discharge Nicholas Graves et al

Some patients, often with Diabetes develop slowly healing ulcerated wounds. In Home care these patients are visited, assessed and treated. Better treatment would be based on assessing the wound in context of whether the present treatment is working, rather than an assessment on the instantaneous appearance of the wound.

Rationale

Infections are more easily cured if they are detected early. Slow-to-heal wounds are better cared for when considered with their history..

In Long Term Nursing homes there are often some patients with Bed Sores, Pressure Ulcers. These wounds are often of long duration and hard to cure. Taking a photo every week allows the Nurse to monitor these cases and to think about them constructively. One economy that has been found is that it is sometimes possible to avoid a clinic visit, simply by sending a Report with Pictures from the program with the wound images attached. Bundling up a patient and getting an ambulance to take him to a clinic is a stressful and expensive business.

WoundFollowUp.com is an initiative to help reduce wound infection, and offers a channel of communication between patient and medical professional. The images can be poor or viewed with not enough attention to miss early stage infections. Some wounds take a long time to heal, and the course of their treatment can be recorded by taking photos and submitting them. This allows the wound to be treated in the context of its course, rather than its instantaneous appearance.

Legal

WoundFollowUp.com acts as a 'store and Forward' service and deletes the image as soon as the specialist has downloaded it. The contract is between the patient or nurse and the wound specialist or surgeon's nurse. WoundFollowUp.com is not a medical records company, more a postal service.

Image Quality

WoundFollowUp.com can show the image at its full magnification, from a digital camera this is usually larger than the computer screen. There is skill and training required to take useful photos. This might become a problem requiring an online photography course for example.

Getting a nurse to check your Wound

If you are a patient who would like to have a wound checked by a nurse, you can write an email to info (at) woundfollowup.com and we will forward it to a clinic. Or, better yet is to talk to your doctor to bring his clinic up to date with tele-wound-care facilities. If you are a wound care specialist who would like to get referrals, then write to info (at) woundfollowup.com to start the process to get onto this list.