Assignment Description - Challenges & Opportunities

• Students will work with MyWoundDoctor, LLC, a for-profit company, which has a keen mission orientation to help improve the quality of care for the “under-served,” as well as, rural populations, “helping them heal” by supporting them with mobile wound care clinical insights and wound care supplies. Students can help the company build a compelling value statement for serving both Medicare and Medicaid populations by working with selected government patient claims data sets to frame the opportunities based on what the care pathways and costs of care look like from actual patient claims data. Profiling the Medicare and Medicaid patients who have chronic wounds and identifying cohorts that are having different wound types managed will help the company offer a valuable approach to wound care that makes the patient experience better, increases overall wound care quality, and reduces the patient care costs.

Definition of Success

• The company views success as identifying statistically significant patient population cohorts that have selected wound types (e.g. surgical site Infections, pressure ulcers, diabetic foot ulcers, etc.), and a structured view of the care pathway and costs associated with each stop along the wound care route for each cohort of patients based on their diagnoses and procedures characteristics.
• For instance, does a patient who discovers they have a diabetic foot ulcer go to their primary care doctor first or an emergency department at a hospital? From there, do they go to recurring visits to a wound clinic or receive home care? How much elapsed time occurs between the first and last point of care? What were the total costs?

Elevator Pitch

• MyWoundDoctor is interested in helping Medicare Advantage and Medicaid Managed Care plans and their patients reduce the time it takes to heal chronic wounds through a telehealth-supported clinical service that uses mobile imaging of wounds and a cloud-based clinical review platform that is staffed with certified wound care nurses and physicians for wound care insights and recommendations. In addition to improving the wound healing rates, the company expects the associated costs of wound care treatment will be reduced by avoiding inpatient and outpatient hospital-based wound care treatment, as well as un-necessary physician office visits and costly wound care supplies that are usually marked up considerably.
• MyWoundDoctor was founded by a Stanford University trained, board-certified plastic surgeon who became disillusioned with the expensive and less effective care that he routinely witnessed being provided to patients with various types of wounds, including observing that many outpatient-based care teams (e.g. home care, nursing and assisted living care) had little understanding of how to recognize, prevent, and treat wounds, thereby leading to infected wounds that frequently required acute care and, in some cases, led to debilitating and expensive lower extremity amputations. MyWoundDoctor has recently entered into wound care contracts with two healthcare providers that care for more than 650,000 corrections patients that are incarcerated in over 500+ prison, jail and detention centers locations nationally.

Students will complete the data analysis and present their findings in final a presentation (virtual or in-person). They will clearly identify the challenges the organization is facing, uncover the root cause of the identified challenges, propose viable solution(s), and recommend the best course of action as well as justify the position through metrics. Students will also provide tangible copies of their work as it pertains to their individual project. All proprietary company information remains confidential at all times.