Meet the company preventing amputations by bringing wound-care experts to patients

By Shalene Gupta (Fast Company)

One of Nima Ahmadi’s earliest memories is of an uncle in Iran who had lost two limbs because he hadn’t received proper wound care. His uncle had to sit on a sheet on the floor. “It was extremely traumatizing as a young child,” says Ahmadi.

The experience inspired Ahmadi to focus his work on improving care for people like his uncle. When he was in college, that meant spending a summer in Guatemala working on prosthetics for patients who’d undergone amputations. As he earned his MBA and worked at health-tech companies, Ahmadi realized his focus should be on wound care. So, in 2021, he and Stanford classmate Sanford Roberts started the Wound Company.

Currently, in the U.S. alone, around 8 million people are suffering from wounds that impact the quality of their life. The country spends up to an estimated $96 billion on wound care a year. Improperly treated wounds can have serious consequences: Up to 24% of foot ulcers result in amputation, while bedsores can be fatal. Yet, though amputations have gotten safer and prosthetics have improved, conditions that can lead to amputations have not improved—the prevalence of wounds like foot ulcers has remained the same over the past 20 years. “The sad thing is, wound care in the U.S. isn’t really that much better than in other less developed parts of the world,” Ahmadi says.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, 52% of wound-care practitioners reported that patient wounds increased in severity. At the same time, visits to in-person clinics decreased, while virtual care for wounds increased. Today, telehealth care for wounds offers the solution to a structural problem that has long since plagued patients.

Read on for the full story.

Source: Fast Company // See original post here.