COOKEVILLE – Cookeville Regional Medical Center’s Advanced Wound Care Center has received national recognition for clinical excellence.
The hospital was presented with the Center of Distinction Award from Healogics, the nation’s leading and largest wound care management company. The CRMC facility achieved outstanding clinical outcomes for 12 consecutive months, including patient satisfaction higher than 92 percent and a wound healing rate of at least 91 percent in less than 31 median days. Out of 630 centers eligible for the Center of Distinction award, only 334 achieved this honor in 2016.
CRMC opened the center in 2015 to meet a huge need in the community, Paul Korth, CEO at Cookeville Regional, said.
“Since then, it has grown and exceeded our expectations in a number of areas,” he added. “It has really served a need for our region. This center has performed above average in terms of healing rate, days to heal and patient satisfaction.”
The Advanced Wound Care Center is a member of the Healogics network of nearly 800, with access to benchmarking data and experience treating approximately 2.5 million chronic wounds. The Advanced Wound Care Center offers highly specialized wound care to patients suffering from diabetic ulcers, pressure ulcers, infections and other chronic wounds that have not healed in a reasonable amount of time. Some of the leading-edge treatments offered at the Wound Care Center include negative pressure wound therapy, debridement, application of cellular-based tissue or skin substitutes to the wound, offloading or total contact casts and hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
“The wound care team is certainly deserving of this recognition,” said surgeon Scott Copeland, M.D., of Middle Tennessee Surgical Specialists and medical director of the Advanced Wound Care Center. “As surgeons, wound care is a specialty that we are heavily involved in, and the fact that we have a wound care center that provides quality care with outstanding results is a great extension to the care we provide our patients.”
In addition to the Center of Distinction Award, the center also received the President’s Circle Award for outstanding achievement in operational metrics. The Advanced Wound Care Center was one of only 35 centers out of 750-plus to receive this award that takes into consideration growth of the center. The Advanced Wound Care Center exceeded the national average of all of Healogics’ centers in four categories, demonstrating significant growth in patients, visits and procedures.
“This is a team effort,” Jason Wyatt, program director, said. “From the front office staff to nurses to physicians, it truly takes a team to get these numbers. We’ve exceeded our own expectations in terms of growth, way above what our original plan predicted for the first year and a half after opening.”
The Advanced Wound Care Center is located at 205 N. Cedar Ave. Any physician may make a referral to the center. A person should seek treatment if he/she has:
- A wound that hasn’t healed in 30 days.
- A sore with increasing pain, redness or swelling, foul odor or a change in color.
- A wound that is draining, getting bigger, has blisters, or has black or brown dead tissue.