Last night was a a very personal success for me. WCA is fortunate to have centers with exceptional hospital partners stretching from California out to Florida and several places in between. I have been at every hyperbaric chamber installation our company has done since I founded WCA in 2002, but last night was pretty special. We installed two chambers at Verdugo Hills Hospital. VHH is the hospital I grew up going to.

The standing joke in our family is that the ER is named after us based on all of the times my two brothers and I had to go there as kids. There is something very rewarding about bringing what you do best back to your home community.We have been working with VHH for several years and recently finished building a brand new facility for the program which includes the first WCA Electronic Education Room (EER). The installation itself was very tricky, 55 inch chamber in a 56 inch hole two stories up, however the Dunkel Brothers team, Kurt, Tom and Karen did a flawless job and made it look easy. I count myself lucky to work with such a fantastic team every day.

During SAWC in San Diego this past month, three initials came up in almost every discussion and lecture; E.M.R., or Electronic Medical Record. It is clear that with the increasing required documentation, that it has become difficult to meet the charting standards without  the assistance of an electronic format.  A new publication by HMP Communications; “Today’s Wound Clinic” (www.todayswoundclinic.com), dedicated almost the entire Spring issue to the subject. Kathy Schaum in her lecture, “The Top Ten Reimbursement Tips for 2008”, brought up the benefits of such a system several times. During her talk, she discussed the requirement by CMS to state how certain products were attached to the patient, and though that is a simple checkbox in an EMR, I saw several panicked looks on the faces of  the attendees throughout the room as the realization of a missing component of their documentation began to take hold. The panicked look was replaced by a tortured look as the reality of what that missing piece could mean if they were audited by CMS set in! That one issue makes a great case for a Wound Care EMR.
Which brings me to the point of this posting, an EMR, no matter how good, is only one piece of the solution. Without a team dedicated to reviewing Local Coverage Determinations, National Coverage Determinations, documentation requirements,  reimbursement changes, and the details of our industry, your documentation may fall short regardless of the complexity, expense, or breadth of your EMR system.

This is precisely why we developed e-wound. In concert with our on site assistance, remote review of documentation and billing, and operational audits, we provide a team of Wound Care and Hyperbaric experts face-to-face right next to your documentation that can answer questions in real time and most recently, even translate for you over our HIPPA compliant telemedicine system.  (Currently we have WCA members able to speak Spanish, Thai, Laos, Hungarian, and even Macedonian!) E-wound is comprised of a full EMR, a telemedicine system, the WCA Dashboard and Library, and a fully integrated internet system for  in-patient and ancillary sites of service.
I feel that WCA is ahead of the curve by providing hospitals all of the services needed to succeed, the ongoing guidance needed to continue with that success, at a price-point that makes sense for the hospital. In my opinion, e-wound is the EMR solution. Please feel free to contact us for more information.

Mike Comer