Healing Wounds

Many health care facilities have worked very hard in recent years to shorten the time needed for patients to recover from illness or injury. Getting back to normal, even if that is a new normal, is essential for overall health. CANDICE CURTIN has been a registered nurse for fifteen years and has been the director of Novant Health Wound Care – New Hanover since 2017.

“I started my career working in the hospital,” says Curtin. “I left the hospital to work in Home Health which is where I found my passion for wound care. There is nothing more rewarding to me in this job than seeing your patients heal; however, it was almost impossible to find wound nurses working outside the hospital in the community at the time, so I took it upon myself to become an expert.”

Curtin says she researched for countless hours trying to find advanced dressings and techniques that would heal patients and pored herself into learning all she could to treat wound patients.

“I was eventually asked to pursue a wound nurse certification and become the wound nurse for the agency,” she says. “In that role, I was able to take the knowledge I had gained and develop a standard of care for all wound patients in the agency, which was extremely successful.”

In late 2017, the wound care facility opened offering a wound and hyperbaric oxygen therapy clinic.

“Our clinic has been named a RestorixHealth Center of Excellence every year since opening and has consistently had the best healing rates,” says Curtin. “I am responsible for the overall leadership, performance and day-to-day activities, and ensure the delivery of high-quality patient care and service to our patients and community.”

In her job, which involves team building, revenue cycle management, clinical operations, customer acquisition, and more, she has learned every role in the clinic so that at any moment’s notice, she can help or fill in as needed.

Curtin utilizes what she learned working in home health on a daily basis. “I frequently saw pressure injuries staged incorrectly and consequently documented and often treated incorrectly as a result,” says Candice. “The staging system is quite difficult to understand unless you thoroughly understand wounds. I had a family member who experienced a pressure injury and this very situation happened to her. I had already created a solution for this issue years prior but had never done anything with it.”

She says she assumed there were options out there to address this issue and was shocked to find there weren’t, this is when Pressure Dx came to life as a product and company.

Pressure Dx is a clinical decision software for pressure injuries with the goal of improving outcomes and decreasing litigation risks by ensuring healthcare providers stage, document, code and treat pressure injuries appropriately.

“More than six Americans die every hour from a pressure injury,” says Curtin. “They are staged incorrectly and/or documented incorrectly more than 80% of the time. After a lot of market research, I found a team who could help ensure the success of this endeavor.”

Currently, Pressude Dx has been issued two patents, and it has a third one pending.

“Now, we are ready to go to market, and we are working to acquire customers,” she says,

The company is looking at funding options as it has relied on bootstrapping up to this point.

“I am truly excited that we have developed an innovative, one-of-a-kind product that can improve clinical and financial outcomes, for both patients and healthcare organizations, while reducing litigation risks,” she says. “Pressure Dx trials have shown that it can help improve outcomes, by helping provide the appropriate documentation, diagnosis code and, ultimately, the appropriate treatment. It all goes back to getting patients healed. That has always been my ultimate goal. Making Pressure Dx successful is another goal I have as well.”

To view more of photographer Aris Harding’s work, go to arisharding.com.

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