This article is sponsored by The Commission for Prevention of Pressure Injuries (CPPI). In this Voices interview, Skilled Nursing News sits down with Healing Partners founder and CEO Matt Welik to learn how a strong wound care program can help boost SNF census. Welik discusses the need for a focus on pressure ulcers, and shows how improving these wounds can be an inspirational tool for staff.
Skilled Nursing News: Matt, you founded Healing Partners in 2019. You serve as CEO. What are the top experiences both in your life and career that you most draw from in your current position?
Matt Welik: I grew up in a health care family. My parents are both physicians. I’ve been exposed to medicine and healing my whole life. My father, in particular, is a nephrologist in a small rural town, so I had exposure to how important specialty care is in underserved areas. I always thought following in my family’s footsteps would lead me to the health care administration side of the dialysis business.
When I was getting my master’s in health care administration, my mentor suggested that I spend my residency period of my master’s degree in a wound center. I’ve been in wound care ever since. That was over a decade ago. My position before founding Healing Partners was as the director of wound care for University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, where the wound issues were just tremendous. Being one of the state’s flagship hospitals, we dealt with some of the most complex wound cases.
I had an opportunity to see what was happening with patients post-discharge. I saw that there was a major gap between the wound care that we were providing in the hospital, including the most advanced wound care that we provided at the state’s level one trauma center, and what was going on with the same patient that we sent to a skilled nursing facility. I wanted to help bridge the gap.
Tell us about Healing Partners, whom does the company serve, and what is its mission?
Welik: I founded Healing Partners to bridge the gap between hospital-based wound care and skilled nursing facilities. The mission of Healing Partners is, first and foremost, to prevent wounds in skilled nursing facilities. Additionally, we want to manage and treat wounds and then to manage patients with chronic wound conditions.
We also work to help facilities improve their own wound care. We are a full partner with the facilities and, together, create a wound care program that is inspiring to the staff and leading the industry in terms of healing. We work with them in terms of data and technology, and all the pieces that it takes to make a comprehensive, successful wound care program.
Healing Partners focuses on the gap between acute care wound prevention and the industry standard of wound prevention. What are the results of that gap existing?
Welik: The cause of the gap is that traditionally, there was a gap in acuity between skilled nursing facilities and acute care facilities. Patients who were on a slow decline were often in skilled nursing facilities. I think that it was a different level of acuity.
Over the past decade or so, skilled nursing facilities have taken on much higher acuity patients, and there’s been a need for that. Hospitals are pushing patients out and there’s more of an expectation for skilled nursing facilities to take on higher acuity patients, both in terms of not readmitting a patient — treating them on-site — and certainly in terms of getting post-surgical patients. Just overall, regardless of a patient’s wound needs, the hospital may send them to a skilled nursing facility.
As the acuity went up, nothing has really changed in the SNF approach to wound care. If anything, it’s the same model that it had been. There are consultant groups that come in and see patients once a week. Facilities may or may not have a wound nurse there to put together a program. Between all of the documentation needs, supply needs and dressing change needs, a wound care program is much more than just one consultant and one nurse. Then there is the work mitigating risk, benchmarking, reporting — there are a lot of needs of a program.
So a wound care program takes a lot beyond having two people, and that gap is what we work to address.
Why does Healing Partners specialize in pressure ulcers specifically?
Welik: Wounds are generally the second largest cause of litigation in long-term care, and most of the issues related to the risk of wounds and undocumented wounds in skilled nursing facilities relate directly to pressure ulcers. Skin can be very fragile in long-term care. If a patient is left to sit for too long in a sedentary position on fragile skin, he or she can develop a pressure injury or a pressure ulcer.
These injuries are definitely related to a SNF’s star ratings, and it’s publicly reported. We find that pressure injuries are not talked about enough in terms of the most important metrics in skilled nursing facilities. There is a lot that can be done that isn’t being done to catch pressure injuries earlier on.
We understand that with everything that administrators and staff are expected to do, it’s hard to focus on this one thing. But it’s a huge quality metric. We focus specifically on the prevention of pressure injuries because you can see patients heal, and it’s very inspiring when you can get a whole group in a whole facility on the mission of keeping patients without pressure ulcers and making into a facility that is pushing a goal of zero harm.
With all that in mind, how does the focus on pressure ulcers help SNFs mitigate risk?
Welik: Our focus on pressure ulcers mitigates risk first by focusing on early documentation, and having appropriate documentation on all pressure ulcers and potential pressure ulcers. We then focus on the methods, education and modalities that a facility can enact to ensure that they don’t have in-house-acquired ulcers that are only discovered once it’s too late.
If something is developing on a patient, we want to catch it early and document it so that we mitigate the risk. Many administrators and owners seem to not recognize the amount of readmissions that result from pressure injuries. These injuries are often tied to systemic infections like sepsis, so we want to ensure that we’re being preventative.
You talk about how wound care is inspirational and that it can combat passion fatigue within skilled care. What is passion fatigue? And how does wound care combat it?
Welik: When I got into skilled nursing and long-term care, I found that the staff in the facilities was often suffering from low morale and feelings of helplessness. Most people get into health care because they have a passion for it and they feel that it’s a calling. Yet because patients in long-term care are so often on a steady decline, it can weigh on a person’s heart and on their motivation and desire to keep giving and giving and giving — especially when it seems like they’re not seeing results.
Wound care is inspiring because we often take patients who are in a point of life where they are in decline, but we’re able to show that even if they are in decline they are able to still have strides forward in terms of some of their conditions. Wounds can heal. Even if a patient is in mental decline or overall physical decline, those patients and the staff around them can be inspired by seeing wounds improve.
The same thing goes for a facility as a whole. Sometimes the whole facility can be inspired and energized by the fact that they’ve moved their quality metrics of in-house acquired pressure ulcers from 20% of their wounds to less than 5%. That inspires people. We love to partner with facilities to create an environment where people are inspired to give better care and to keep caring and to reignite the passion that they have for why they got into health care in the first place.
You’ve discussed a number of ways in which Healing Partners helps SNFs. What is your favorite client success story?
Welik: My favorite client success story is when we go into a facility that has been cited by surveyors for their wound care and we help them change. We have a building that was cited for documentation, undiscovered wounds, and not following orders appropriately regarding wound care. Three pretty severe issues. We came in and introduced our full program, and now their documentation is 100% compliant. We’ve implemented a skill education program to make sure that everybody — including their CNAs and all their floor nurses — know their role in the wound care process, and can easily identify the treatments and what products to use.
It’s just a complete turnaround in a facility, and pretty soon, the facility gains a reputation for providing great wound care. Not only have we taken a facility from being cited in surveys for negative performance in wound care, now it’s one of the biggest pride points for a facility. That hits at every point of what our mission is.
Entering this year, no one knew what to expect in skilled nursing. What has been the biggest surprise to you in the industry in the first half of the year, and what impact do you think that surprise will have on the industry for the remainder of the year?
Welik: So many facilities are struggling right now with census, so the biggest surprise to me has been how a good wound care program can start to build a pipeline of patients back into a facility. I think that the competition over census will continue because there’s such a need for skilled nursing facilities, but once a facility is struggling with reputation or starts to deny patients because they can’t take in high acuity wound care patients, I’ve been shocked to see how that can impact census down the line.
The counter of that is that I’ve also seen the opposite where we’ve been able to go in and use a wound care program to help them build their census. I think post-COVID that’s going to be a huge part of the need of having a good partner in any ancillary service.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This article is sponsored by The Commission for Prevention of Pressure Injuries (CPPI). To learn more about how Healing Partners can help build your wound care program and improve census, visit healing-partners.com.
The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more — shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact [email protected].
