Progress in wound care is slow at best. Often clinicians are slow to embrace and adopt new approaches to both treatment and diagnosis. Attempts have been made in recent times to provide diagnostic tools but the clinical community was slow to embrace them and added to their frustration, one significant barrier to adoption was that of funding. Payers and those responsible for reimbursement make it more difficult for wound care to progress by introducing significant ‘proof’ barriers.
Can diagnostics turn the corner in 2015? Can we at last have a diagnostic suite that helps move wound care towards the clinical specialty it needs to be if progress is to be achieved in the management of the silent epidemic that will be upon the healthcare systems of the world?
Most attempts at the provision of diagnostic tools, for wound carers, come from smaller more ‘start‐up’ companies or from Universities, where funding for research and product support/registration is generally low. This poses significant time and financial pressures on organisations that do not necessarily have the means to provide the ‘burden of proof’ asked for by clinicians and regulators. So, little, if any, progress is likely unless we can change this environmental component to open innovation in this very important area, to ensure continued progress towards clinical specialization of wound care.
Several players in the diagnostic arena have approached us to ask if a mechanism can be found to open the environment within wound care to better embrace diagnostics: To provide an environment where smaller players can work together leveraging the synergies of intellect, finances and resource to better serve their joint needs. Surely this is possible as we have seen such a collaboration in the area of infection with the advent of the International Wound Infection Institute. Perhaps we need the same in the diagnostics arena to move the environmental impactors into a more positive trajectory.
Interested? If so we would like to hear from you, whether from the research, commercial or clinical arenas. If this is an area of interest for you then let us know and surely we can build some momentum to positively influence the research and development and subsequent clinical use of important tools for the care of patients with wounds.