Digital Wound Photography: Overcoming Barriers in Acute Care

Purpose:

To create an integrated and comprehensive approach to wound care that utilizes digital wound photography within an acute care setting. This approach promotes and accelerates performance excellence.

Background:

 Wound photography serves as an adjunct to a thorough narrative wound assessment. However, certain items will need to be taken into consideration when implementing a wound photography protocol within your facility. This multidisciplinary approach ensures a thorough exploration of all aspects of wound photography.

Barriers Identified:

1. Liability issues
2. HIPAA guidelines
3. Informed consent
4. Photographers and competency
5. Type of camera
6. Patient identification
7. Storing of photography

Design:

The development of the digital photography protocol occurred over a one year period. During this time, the project development team addressed all obstacles facing acute care. Implementation of the protocol then occurred. Key aspects of the program include:

1. Securing formal written consent upon admission as part of the hospital permission process;
2. Ensuring all wound photography is bound by the hospital’s confidentiality policy;
3. Capturing  the patient’s medical record number, date of photograph and site location with each photograph;
4. Scanning the photograph directly into the electronic record;
5. Limiting camera access to emergency trauma center (ETC) and wound care departments; and
6. Identifying what wounds to photograph, based on the predetermined criteria/process.

Outcomes:

Digital photography supports the WOCN’s written record of the patient, particularly providing visual documentation of a patient’s pre-existing wounds upon admission to the hospital. It also helps to assess the rate of wound healing and efficacy of treatment.

Overall, digital photography promotes, educates and increases awareness of wounds while providing evidence based wound care. It provides accessibility for direct care givers in understanding the complexity of their patients across the continuum of care, which includes acute care, home care and the outpatient wound center.