by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Feb 19, 2020 | Healthcare Payment Policy
To assist the Alliance of Wound Care Stakeholders in making its comments to CMS about the proposed “episode of care” payment model for Cellular and/or Tissue Based Products (CTPs) – sometimes referred to as “skin substitutes,” the US Wound Registry...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Feb 18, 2020 | Health Information Technology and Wound Care, Healthcare Payment Policy
There is lot of interest in surrogate measures of wound outcome to capture important aspects of treatment beyond closure. Because it provides insight into the patient’s experience, Quality of life (QOL) is an obvious surrogate for healing rate. For your own safety,...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Feb 17, 2020 | Healthcare Payment Policy
In 1787, Catherine II (also known as Catherine the Great), a Russian Tsarina, set out on a tour of the Crimea, an area Russia had annexed from the Ottoman Empire. The area had been devastated by the Crimean War and was a mess. Grigory Potemkin, governor of the Crimea,...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Feb 14, 2020 | Miscellaneous Musings
Did you know St. Valentine is the patron saint of lovers, epileptics and beekeepers? And also Wound Care nurses… definitely wound care nurses.
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Feb 14, 2020 | Healthcare Payment Policy
I was asked to take a look at a 50-page report on a wound center’s post-payment review of hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) services. Nearly all the wounds that were treated were truly limb-threatening, and most of the patients got better. Unfortunately, their...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Feb 12, 2020 | Healthcare Payment Policy
Excerpted from Today’s Wound Clinic The hospital supply contracting process is complicated and slow. Physicians, however, can make purchasing decisions quickly and directly. Manufacturers need to get prepared for a dramatic shift to less-expensive wound...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Feb 11, 2020 | Healthcare Payment Policy
I changed my specialty code to Undersea and Hyperbaric Medicine a few months ago. It was necessary because since I am Family Practice Board Certified, the data on Medicare spending for my patients was being compared to that of FP’s across the country. However, I...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Feb 10, 2020 | Miscellaneous Musings
I didn’t think it was possible for routine outpatients in the Wound Clinic to get sicker, but apparently it is. At the end of a long and defeating day of unsolvable problems, my last patient was a retired physician in his 90’s with a cardiac ejection fraction of 15%....
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Feb 7, 2020 | Healthcare Payment Policy
Even though I was a child, I remember the space race of the 1960’s. That’s because my Dad was at the School of Aerospace Medicine, where human physiology research was being conducted at a breakneck pace. To handle the problem that ink pens didn’t work...
by Caroline Fife, M.D. | Feb 5, 2020 | US Wound Registry
The average wound is treated with at least 5 different dressing products (which may or may not make sense based on the wound characteristics recorded), and dressings are often layered into a “club sandwich” of competing products that ought to be served with a pickle...
