Healthcare professionals are under increasing pressure to justify the quality of their work (Vowden and Vowden, 2010; Wound Care Today, 2020). To do so, comprehensive, accurate and current data which details and supports cost-effectiveness and the quality of the service provided is required. Audit and ongoing clinical data capture can provide the evidence to do this (Vowden and Vowden, 2010).
 
Wound care requires objective data collection and documentation to determine if a treatment is clinically and cost-effective (Anghel et al, 2016). Wound assessment obtains detailed information using observation, physical examination and clinical investigation in order to formulate and monitor a management plan (Nix, 2012).
 
Wound assessment became the subject of a CQUIN target (Commissioning for Quality and Innovation), between 2017 and 2019 (Wounds UK, 2017). The goal of which was to use holistic assessment of the patient and their wound to save time and improve practice in the long term (Wounds UK, 2017).
 
However, the burden of wounds study (Guest et al, 2015) highlighted the lack of thorough, holistic wound assessment in UK practice, and highlighted the crucial problems that this triggers from the start of treatment onwards (Wounds UK, 2017). The burden of wounds study also reported serious gaps in documentation causing problems such as lack of a correct diagnosis (Guest et al, 2015). 
 
More recently, the National Wound Care Strategy Programme (NWCSP) (Adderley, 2019) has been developed to address the issue of sub-optimal wound care and recognises the urgent need for valid and reliable metrics to measure wound care activity and outcomes.
 
There are a number of benefits of thorough holistic wound assessment, including:

• Improved outcomes
• Improved patient quality of life
• Decreased workload and associated costs for the organisation (Wounds UK, 2018).

With all this in mind, Norfolk Community Health and Care NHS Trust (NCHC NHS Trust) decided to evaluate a new way of collecting and documenting wound status data, to avoid the subjectivity of traditional methods.
 
WoundWorks inSight^® is a unique and easy to use wound management platform that simply combines an app and camera technology to transform a mobile device, such as an ipad or iphone, into a wound management platform that can be used in any care setting. inSight^® enables standardised, accurate wound assessment at the point of care. In addition, inSight^® allows the sharing of real-time data and the generation of reports, giving it a valuable role in telehealth and improving efficiency in wound care services.
 

WoundWorks inSight^® is being used successfully by several trusts in the UK to improve data collection and sharing to improve efficiency of working, to reduce costs and to improve patient outcomes (Wound Care Today, 2020).
 
The system has proved useful within NCHC NHS Trust, bringing benefits to practice such as engaging the patient in their progress, and enabling the easy uploading of images to the patient’s central records. Working in partnership with our patients really has a positive impact on concordance. However, as with all technology, the system is not a substitute for clinical judgement, and both must be used in combination to best effect. We are interested to see how the ongoing use of this innovative technology can improve care/record keeping in this area.
 

This article first appeared in JCN view it here.