Specialized Wound Care Services in the Long Term Acute Care Hospital

An Overview of how the program works in the LTACH Facility 

LTACH Program

WoundCentrics has developed a specialized wound services program for the Long-Term Acute Care Hospital (LTACH).  Our wound program focuses on the specific needs of LTACH patients, the clinical challenges of the high acuity case mix of patients and the administrative and regulatory environment for admissions, management and discharge.  

In short, what we do is provide wound care trained physicians (or more typically physician extenders) that collaborate with facility medical staff and the wound care nursing team to increase the level of care and oversight provided to each patient's wound care plan of care. We eliminate the need for the wound care team to write telephone/verbal orders from non-wound care trained physicians for wound care orders by following (from a medical perspective) every wound care patient. In fact, we most often see our wound care patients daily due to the high acuity of patients and the strategy to meet the goals of case management and discharge planning.

LTACH PROVIDERS

WoundCentrics providers are expected to assess every patient admitted, whether or not they have a wound identified prior to admission, thus adding to the level of care your patients receive. This typically means they will get a nursing admission assessment, a head to toe skin assessment from your wound care team and an assessment of skin and high risk medical factors that might cause skin issues even in the absence of current breakdown or other issues. 

Operationally, once the teams are established, the WoundCentrics Provider and the facility wound care team collaborate daily on which patients need to be seen together and which ones they can "divide and conquer" to provide treatment.    

For example, if there is a debridement, the provider will provide informed consent and ask the team to help by getting the required consent documentation completed and then either debride or schedule the debridement for a mutually agreeable time.   

Or, if there are ventilated patients that require an extra set of hands to see a wound, they'll want to see those together. We prefer, whenever possible, for new patients to be assessed together.  The team would then discuss the problems, potential interventions and create collaborative treatment plans. The wound care team would create the nursing plan of care and the Provider writes needed orders and documents the treatment plan in their own note. 

The Provider will then also participate in the case management process by attending or providing written updates to the IDT team/meeting and can facilitate written orders needed for discharge (i.e. wound vacs or dressing changes for home health, etc...).

ltach corporate team

From an administrative perspective, the corporate team from WoundCentrics will provide imaging software. Both the provider and the wound care team will have access to our clinical support team to look at photos or discuss tough/non-healing wounds. Our clinical team also reviews the photos (remotely or onsite during site visits) to ensure that appropriate debridement(s) are completed in a manner (timely and sufficiently aggressive) to promote optimal outcomes.  

The WoundCentrics corporate team then also reviews provider documentation and facility coding to ensure that DRGs are optimized for accurate reimbursement.   

If requested, our clinical team can also participate in educational activities such as skills fairs and soon we will have our ANCC accreditation as an approved provider and can offer nursing staff continuing education when needs arise.