Navigate the healthcare industry
Healthcare Brew covers pharmaceutical developments, health startups, the latest tech, and how it impacts hospitals and providers to keep administrators and providers informed.
On Fridays, we schedule our rounds with Healthcare Brew readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.
This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Nima Ahmadi, co-founder and CEO of the Wound Company, a Minneapolis-based virtual platform that works with health plans and providers to connect patients to wound and ostomy care.
Ahmadi highlighted the importance of treating chronic wounds, a condition that he noted generally receives little attention outside of healthcare circles despite the fact that it affects millions of people in the US—including 10.5 million Medicare beneficiaries according to a 2023 report—and costs the health system an estimated $50+ billion each year.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about your work and why you decided to focus on wound care.
Within wound care, the whole space is completely broken. Wound care companies benefit from patients being wounded, having multiple wounds, staying wounded—and that’s just not the right financial incentive system. Patients are seen when their wounds have advanced quite a bit, and a lot of stuff is done to them. Then they’re let loose, and they don’t get follow-up; things go awry—there’s a huge spike of intervention.
What we’ve pioneered is to assign somebody who’s truly an expert in wound care—nurse practitioners, nurses—to every patient with a wound. We are going to follow them continuously and remain engaged so we can intercept these wounds earlier, we can heal them faster, we can drive prevention of these wounds, and we can use technology and analytics to help us segment those populations and know where to throttle up—what kind of individualized care plans these individual patients should be in and quantify our results continuously to drive a closed feedback loop.
We do all of this without participating in those kinds of perverse incentive models and actually shifting the payment system in wound care to value-based care.
What’s the best change you’ve made or seen at a place you’ve worked?
With the Wound Company, we’ve already helped hundreds and hundreds of patients. We have saved people’s legs—even as a young startup—from amputation. Despite nutritional status, smoking, and diabetes. We’ve shown that this model of getting engaged early and staying engaged can actually be helpful and heal faster or maintain wounds without further complications. That’s been extremely rewarding to see.
What healthcare trend are you most optimistic about and why?
The shift to value-based care and actually creating incentive structures that promote keeping people healthy, like what we’re doing with our payment model for wound care. The conversation and what we’re trying to push toward. There seems to be more energy around that, especially for our most vulnerable senior populations.