Driving Wound Care Forward: AI, Wearables, and Point-of-Care Diagnostics

Announcer:
Welcome to Spotlight on Wound Care on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Ms. Kara Couch, who’s a certified wound care nurse practitioner, the Director of Wound Care Services at George Washington University Hospital, and an Associate Research Professor of Surgery at the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at the George Washington University. She’ll be sharing updates on the use of technology in wound care. Here’s Ms. Couch now.

Ms. Couch:
I’ve been a wound care nurse practitioner for 23 years, and what I love about this field is that we are constantly innovating and finding new therapeutics or theranostics to help advance the field and get the patients the care that they need. Using these advanced modalities or technologies, such as near-infrared spectroscopy or bacterial fluorescence, helps us reach clinical decision-making much faster with objective data, such as the tissue perfusion or bacterial profile that the patient has. And these devices are becoming much more readily available. Really, it’s point-of-care testing rather than only being able to access these things at big university settings. People have options and availability to get them into any wound care setting, and with the advent of AI and technology, we’re further harnessing all of these devices to unify and solidify into one grand thing.

And we can have digital imaging taken of the patients. We have the measurements that can be obtained, and that really helps to eliminate any gaps in practice or knowledge issues that, say, a newer wound care provider would have versus someone who’s been in the practice for decades. We can use these technologies and advancements to simply keep pushing the field further ahead.

I’m very excited about sensor technology and wearables with the patients—things like smart bandages that would change colors and let us know if there’s bacteria, and also helping to ensure that patients are able to ambulate as per our guidance. We almost can put pedometers in them. And when we’re doing things like compression, they can let us know that we’re wrapping patients at their right level of pressure that we want. So it really takes away some of the variability and has us working much more from a standard playing field, which is where we need to be to help these patients.

Announcer:
That was Ms. Kara Couch talking about what’s new in wound care technology. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Spotlight On Wound Care on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!