We recieved a call this week wanting a little more information about our company. The exact question was, "What the HE** is cloud wound care?"When we realized that our caller was actually from another wound care management company, we couldn't help but laugh a little.Cloud wound care is an approach we have been working with at WCA for about six years. I'll breakdown the concept here.When we, or any management company, first helps a hospital get a wound care program started, there is a great deal of hands-on assistance needed. There is hiring to be done, layouts to be designed, intense training, coding education, billing processes implemented, policy and procedure manuals developed, and the list goes on. These are all tasks which require knowledge, expertise, and experience, and is the exact reason that you partner with a management company in the first place.However, as the program matures, (which from our experience is about three years ) the program no longer needs the same intense hands-on approach. If built right, the team will be running smoothly, coding and billing issues operate as they should, policy manuals are in place, training can be done remotely, and the overall operation of the program can be managed by the Program Director and their team. We feel that the hospital partner shouldn't have to pay the same amount to the management group as they did during the more intense (and costly) phase. Our expenses are reduced, so yours should be too.That is why we reduce our annual fee at this point of our contracts, and roll into a year by year agreement. We should constantly earn your business (rule 6). The occasional wrench in the works happens, and you may need feet on the ground, yet those instances can be reduced by building a program well in the first place and our team comes running when needed.Ongoing reviews, updates, mentoring, audits, financial reviews, education, and marketing resources are still needed, however, we can provide these services through the web based programs that the team has been using since day one!Our compliance and audit teams have access to all documentation for each center in real time since every entry is done in our "cloud-based" EMR, and can conduct full reviews immediately. Our financial team is able to monitor every billing entry and has alarms set for when things are not meeting projections. Our program management team conducts weekly meetings with the center staff face-to-face on our HIPPA compliant telepresence system. Our medical director and physician services group can conduct real-time patient reviews, physician education, and even see the patient in question using the same tool. Our e-wound suite allows the stakeholders at any program to see exactly how the program is succeeding at any time using our dashboards - which includes our center metric (our "brown m&m") which I discussed in a previous blog entry. This proprietary program also lets us transfer marketing materials, forms, charge master updates, and countless other tools quickly and easily. Our team of experts is always only a call or tele-meeting away!So, bottom line, Cloud "Wound Care" is how we make sure you can run your own program and still have all of the resources needed without the exceptional cost associated with many turn-key management contracts.If you are interested in our approach, give us a call we'd love to discuss this concept even more.