The Methodist Fremont Health Center for Wound Healing was recently recognized by an industry leader as one of the top wound care centers in the country.
With a patient satisfaction rate of 95% and a heal rate of 97%, the Center for Wound Healing was one of 34 clinics to be awarded the President’s Circle award by Healogics, the nation’s largest provider of wound care services.
The Healogics Wound Care Center network is made up of 600 wound care clinics nationwide that specialize in relieving patients of chronic wounds like diabetic foot ulcers, pressure ulcers and infections.
A chronic or non-healing wound is a sore or wound that hasn’t healed within 30 days, according to Betsy Flores, program director of the Center for Wound Healing.
“The majority of patients that we see are people that have any open wound that hasn’t healed in 30 days,” Flores said in an interview with The Fremont Tribune. “That’s kind of the margin that most physicians will go by, is if patient has had any type of wound — and there’s so many types that we can treat — kind of a rule of thumb is if there’s not a sign of improvement or healing within 30 days that wound becomes chronic and then that’s where we come in as an advanced group care team.”
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The wound care center team is led by Dr. Adam Pentel, who said that in addition to healing the wound, improving the patient’s quality of life is a key component of what they do.
“Having an open wound can limit you in some of the things you’re able to do out in the community,” Pentel said. “You’re always worried about the wound becoming infected or if it drains and it shows through your clothes and people wonder what’s going on. People are self-conscious about doing some things when they have an open wound, so I think giving them the hope that, ‘yes, we’re making progress and … you’re going to have a good chance of healing it so you can get back to doing all the things you want to do in life and having less chances of infections or recurrences of those wounds.’”
The Center for Wound Healing uses advanced techniques and equipment to determine the root cause of a chronic wound and work to heal it, according to Abbie Nieman, the unit’s clinical nurse manager.
“We will do infection treatments, we will do compression to correct any sort of lower extremity edema, but we also have the advanced modalities so we can offload with total contact casts, we can offer hyperbaric oxygen treatments, we do cellular tissue based products, which is where we have tissue that is dried — whether it’s amniotic or human, even synthetic — that basically transfers tissue growth factors from it to the wound bed,” Nieman said.
Nieman oversees the wound care center’s day-to-day operations, checking in with patients and monitoring their progress. Nieman also meets weekly with Pentel, Flores and other health care providers to perform a “deep dive” into each patient’s case to make sure the healing process is on track.
“We do what’s called patient surveillance (where) we take a deep dive for every patient that we see (to see) that we’re doing all the things to make their healing process go as quickly as possible,” Nieman said. “We follow what Healogics calls the essential steps to wound healing and we take a deep dive and make sure we’re hitting all the things to make sure that patient can heal as fast as possible.”
Due to its specialization, the Center for Wound Healing team is also able to spend more time with a patient than a primary care physician who likely has dozens of patients to see each day.
“We’re a lot more efficient because we are dealing with something that a primary care doctor doesn’t have the time to deal with,” Pentel said. “We’re looking through (the patient’s) history to find out what are potential causes for that wound and how can we deal with that. A lot of times, some of the potential causes haven’t been addressed yet. That’s just a longer, in depth process to order the proper tests and the proper dressings to get those people to heal.”
Every patient is different and every wound is different, so being able to take the time to fully understand what’s causing it is vital to a patient’s healing.
“There’s lots of different types of wounds to have and the proper diagnosis of that, whether it’s an acute injury or a chronic wound, there are a lot of different avenues to take to heal it,” Pentel said. “The number of products that are available to us to help patients heal is enormous. Every patient’s treatment is going to be different as far as how their wound is addressed each week.”
The Methodist Fremont Health Center for Wound Healing team also prides itself on staying up-to-date with the latest news and wound healing methods, which can change rapidly from one month to the next.
“Primary care doctors don’t have the time to be up to date with that and I think they really appreciate that we can kind of take the reins of a wound that has been bothering a patient for a long time and … heal (them) a lot faster so that the primary care doctors can worry about other health issues of different patients or that same patient,” Pentel said. “I think they really appreciate that we have the knowledge that, as it continues to change, we continue to be up to date with the knowledge to get those people to heal at the fastest rate possible.”