The Frank & Lizzie Show Episode 033: From Image to Insight: The Future of Wound Documentation

In this episode of The Frank & Lizzie Show, dive into the future of wound documentation with groundbreaking technology from Swift Medical. Featuring insights from Scott Nelson, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Swift Medical, and Cullen Chiu, Chief Nursing Officer at Kane Woundcare, this episode reveals how AI-powered tools are transforming wound care documentation and infection detection.
Discover how Swift Medical’s mobile-first platform guides clinicians in capturing precise, high-quality wound images that AI instantly analyzes to provide accurate, standardized data, making documentation faster, more reliable, and audit-ready. Learn about the innovative Swift Ray device, which combines thermal imaging and fluorescence to detect infections earlier than ever before, supporting better treatment decisions across care settings.
Whether you're a clinician or healthcare leader, get expert perspectives on how these advanced technologies simplify workflows, improve patient outcomes, and enable more consistent, coordinated wound care.
Tune in for practical insights on harnessing the power of AI and multimodal imaging to revolutionize wound documentation and management. Be sure to subscribe to the Frank & Lizzie Show for the latest in wound care education.

Welcome back to The Frank & Lizzie Show. We’re here live at the Symposium on Advanced Wound Care, SAWC, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Lizzie, I’m glad you’re back with me, too.

Well, that is a warm welcome. Thanks, Frank. Great to be back here, of course. Today we’re talking about documentation, a hot topic at this conference and in everyday life as well.

As you know, Frank, in all the medical fields I’ve worked in, documentation has been one of the biggest headaches. But in wound care, nurses feel like it’s such a struggle, and it has only gotten worse. The patients are even more complex.

Well, Lizzie, absolutely. Let me tell you that in wound care, it’s not just filling out a form or paperwork. The challenge is capturing what’s happening to that wound. It can get really messy if you’re not consistent, if you don’t have good measurements, and if you don’t have images and data.

Yeah, I think every clinician documents just a little bit differently. Certainly, the systems are all different. But when it’s hard to track a wound over time—and I’ve seen that in the EHRs I’ve used—it really can impact the care because it becomes completely fragmented.

Coordinating care is the other huge headache that we’ve seen, whether between agencies, sites, or even specialties. It’s terrible. So how do you keep it all straight?

Well, I’ll be frank with you. It really becomes a pain point for us because what you see is subjective information, subjective assessment, poor documentation, and fragmented care. So when you look at all this, you’re spending more time chasing the paperwork than actually treating your patients.

Yeah, and right now, I mean, the stakes are high. Look at audits. More than ever, documentation has become the real issue.

Right. So the question becomes, how do we fix this problem? And that’s why today we’re going to be talking with Swift Medical, because I believe they have a game-changing solution. Scott Nelson, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Swift Medical, welcome to The Frank & Lizzie Show. And we also have Cullen Chiu, Chief Nursing Officer at Kane Wound Care.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for having me.

So, Swift Medical—how do you describe it to a clinician? Let’s say you’re in the booth and somebody is talking to you who’s overwhelmed by all these challenges we’ve just talked about. How do you describe how Swift Medical is a solution for these documentation hassles?

Well, Frank, Lizzie, I appreciate the time to be here today. It’s always good to connect with you both. I would describe Swift Medical as a digital wound care system. Think of it as an enterprise-grade solution. It does all these things, but it really plugs into your workflow and provides seamless support and integration into how you’re conducting patient care around wounds.

It’s a mobile-first platform that helps you capture high-quality wound images and turns that information into reliable structured data. So nothing subjective—clear facts about the wound’s size, depth, and progression. We give all that information back to you in a manner where you can easily see the trends and information coming from that.

So: easy capture, easy deployability, easy use, mobile-first, and a lot of good information.

So this is not just a fancy camera. It actually takes the data and presents it objectively. And the other thing is, it can track the wounds consistently and, probably better yet, communicate across these fragmented places.

Exactly. It works across hospitals, outpatient clinics, mobile wound care providers, and home health. It’s really built for the whole care team, regardless of where you’re providing care. It makes your workflow faster. It makes documentation audit-ready and much cleaner. And it’s scalable across provider groups of any size.

So, a hot topic at this conference is AI.

It’s not just at this conference. It’s all conferences. It’s everywhere.

So I hear a lot about AI-powered platforms these days. Can you walk us through how Swift Medical works for everyday clinicians? What happens if you open the app and you’re standing in front of a patient’s wound?

Absolutely. Great question. First, you open the app on a mobile device. The software runs regardless of what device or platform you choose to incorporate. It’s designed for very user-friendly, mobile-first utilization.

You launch the app. From there, you use the device to capture images of the wound. The system guides you through the process. We’re not going to leave it up to you to figure it out. We’re going to guide you through in a very intrinsic and seamless fashion. It guides you on where to hold the device and how far away to hold it, without really needing to provide further instruction.

As a result, you’re getting very consistent and cohesive images. And as you go back and look at the progressive scans of how the wound is healing, it makes it easy and intuitive. We’re not allowing you to take an image way up here or way down there. The system tells you where to go, and you just push a button.

And lighting and all that stuff.

Absolutely. We’re going to work where you are, and we’re not going to ask you to change your practice.

Great. So this is like a Polaroid. It actually helps you take the picture the right way.

Do people know what a Polaroid is now?

I know you’re old, but...

So back in her day, her mom used to take this picture, and it would come out right away. Then you’d shake it for about 30 seconds, and you’d never take it the same way again.

The point is, it’s not just a snapshot. It is capturing the picture the right way so that you can see progress over time.

Exactly. The system provides real-time user feedback to adjust distance and ensure that, as the clinician, you don’t need to learn our system. We guide you through it. The goal is to require less of you when using the system so you can do more of what you need to do, which is take care of the patient.

Being a software-first platform, we have control calibrations to ensure consistent performance, including color calibration around skin tone variability. If you have lighting frequency or other changes, it is designed to provide a simple method to get what you’re trying to get: an incredibly accurate image, very easily and consistently.

Right. So once you have the image, what do you do with it? I can imagine that, first, you’ve dummy-proofed taking the image, which is half the battle, because we know it’s not always wound care clinicians taking the image. Sometimes it’s bedside staff or untrained staff. So once you get that image, how do clinicians get those measurements and the size? Because I think that’s the other half of the battle: how do we objectively measure those wounds?

Once the image is captured, all of that is done instantaneously. It measures the wound size, the wound depth, and other key parameters that we’re evaluating—what the components of the wound are, what makes up the wound—and provides all that information instantaneously both to the cloud and to the provider.

So it really is just no manual measurements, no adjustments. Press a button, and we give you all the information.

Now, we also make it very easy for the clinician if you disagree to tell us what it needs to be. If you wanted to capture something and we missed a segment of a wound that you wanted to ensure was in there, if you have multiple wounds, or if there’s an area at the edge that you don’t feel should be included, you can do a finger swipe. So we’re making it easy to give you the information, while still allowing you to be the clinician and make the final decision.

Wow. In today’s times, when we have regulatory changes and clawbacks, having a true surface area calculation is not only essential, but it may make the difference in an audit.

For sure. And I think wound depth has been kind of the redheaded stepchild of imaging and wound care. It hasn’t been something that’s been consistent, particularly when you’re not measuring it at the same angles. It can be super challenging, but it definitely plays a big role in treatment, especially when we’re looking at wastage and how much you need to fill the wound. It previously got very little attention from CMS. Can you talk a little bit more about wound depth?

Absolutely. I mentioned earlier that we’re going to automatically capture the wound, the surface area, and the surface area of the actual edges of the wound. So not just imagine a big rectangle, right? What’s the true surface area of the wound?

We’re automatically calculating the depth. We’re really going to give you a highly precise and accurate understanding of what constitutes the area of the wound. If you’re using this to determine an advanced dressing or a skin substitute, it’s more important now than ever economically to the provider.

There is no wastage chargeback. Those J-code modifiers are now gone. We’ve normalized pricing across sites of care. So if you don’t align your skin substitute to the area of the wound, the provider is kind of left holding a little bit of a bill. This gives you a much better understanding of the accuracy of the wound depth, all the way to the surface area.

Yeah. Having depth is important.

I mean, it’s very subjective otherwise. So how does Swift Medical handle this on the documentation side? Are clinicians still typing notes? How does this really flow through? Logistics is a huge pain point as well.

Workflow drives everything. The system integrates. Swift Medical integrates with electronic health records where possible, and we’re always looking to continue to expand. There are many EMRs, as everyone using this knows.

As we work with clinicians, it’s about understanding how and when we need to integrate with the EMR, where we are operating as a standalone, and where we’re passing information in a different fashion. The goal is to have as seamless a workflow change as possible for the clinician, to bring these advanced modalities and technologies into their work.

The goal is simply to make their job easier, make their job faster, and allow them to focus on clinical care. We’re providing a high degree of accuracy of information to complement their role.

Well, it sounds like a workflow saver. That’s huge. But the question is, how does it keep teams across different sites on the same page?

Good question, Frank. Because the images are standardized and secured in the cloud—we’re a cloud-based system—any authorized member is going to have access. As we work with our implementation teams in bringing accounts on, it’s about understanding how they need their team structured.

If it’s a single provider or multiple providers, if they have locations across states—our job is not to set that for them, but to understand how their clinicians or providers need access to the data and to set it up in a manner that supports their workflow and fits into their practice modalities. Whether in a wound care clinic or a hospital, we scale from a single provider to a large enterprise implementation. That consistency is key for coordinated care.

In my travels and talking to clinicians, we’ve come upon some resistance among clinicians who maybe aren’t as tech-savvy. I recently talked to one who had a flip phone, and I was like, “Oh, okay.” So in cases where you feel there’s a barrier to implementation because of tech fear, how hard or easy is it to implement this into somebody’s system?

Big, big need. We’ve designed it to be intuitive. We have training built in. Within the app itself is a learning module. So if there’s a new provider coming on board, or maybe someone was out for a while, they can launch a learning module and watch videos on how to use the system, along with reminders and refreshers.

We have a complete learning module system on the web portal that they can access, and accounts can also use it to assign training to different team members. We’re really trying to make it easy regardless of your mode of learning or how you best react to things. We have training and support tools regardless of where you are.

Right. Fitting this into the clinician’s work could be not only a time saver, but it can also help save frustration. The communication fragmentation, and also having the right data—that’s huge.

Absolutely. Our goal is to empower clinicians with precise, actionable data. It supports better patient care without adding to their workload. Again, it comes down to workflow. They have a prescribed workflow. They’ve built their business and practice around that workflow, which allows them to scale and build. We don’t want to disrupt that. So how do we plug in and really amplify that?

Additionally, we now have Swift Ray.

Okay, so what is Swift Ray?

I put it out here for a while hoping you’d ask about it.

So Swift Ray is quite the achievement. We talk about being software-first, and it’s a device that slides over your smartphone. It converts your smart device into a spectral imaging platform.

Swift Ray is a multimodal imaging tool that fits in the palm of your hand, slides over your iPhone, and combines thermal and fluorescent imaging. Now we’re really looking at thermal variations, so you can begin to anticipate where you’re seeing inflammation points that are driving increased temperature, as well as bacterial infection detection through fluorescent illumination of bacteria.

Well, you know I love thermal imaging. As a matter of fact, I love this technology because, as we’re talking about this, we’re talking about inflammation that could lead to infection. So not only are we moving into informed wound care decision-making, but it makes the clinician’s life a lot easier, makes it more objective, and the documentation is there.

I would have to think this is pretty easy to implement. Other devices are a little bit bulkier, but I mean, I can fit this into my pocket. You know, it’s mine then.

No, but this is easy to implement anywhere—just slide it over an iPhone or whatever device they have. It seems super easy.

That’s the intent. Again, we’re software-first, with a hardware component that adds to the functionality and utilization. But it’s really about being software-first and easy to use in any setting, whether you’re a hospital, outpatient clinic, home health, or skilled nursing facility.

If you’re Frank, looking at the thermal variations of fish because you’re wanting to understand who caught the first fish, it really applies in any setting.

But with wounds, we also allow longitudinal tracking. You’re building data along the way. Whether you’re doing a thermal image every time or sometimes, or looking at bacterial fluorescence, you’re always capturing the image and then looking for wound area reduction. We’ve got depth building up and wound area shrinking in. It’s really making it easy to capture all that information.

Okay, yes, I do take devices. I forget they’re in my pocket, and then I go home with them and use them for everything else.

Having this flexibility and consistency really helps cut down errors and gaps in care that we see all the time, especially when patients are moving from one location to another. I see that a lot. You have to restart, and you lose the objectivity.

Yeah, I would think if I was running all over the hospital, this would be super easy to slide into my pocket and be able to use on any patient. Especially in the mobile wound care space, which has been—and maybe still will be; we’ll see—something that continues. You can just go to the patient with it, rather than having something bulky sitting at the desk of whatever clinic you’re at.

Right. Absolutely. Wound care is changing, but it’s not going away. The device is used to bring spectral imaging to any user, anywhere. Again, it’s the ultimate portability.

It can scale up. So whether you’re a single provider or a large multipractice group, it’s something that’s really going to scale up and apply regardless of where you are and fit into your workflow.

Great. Now that we’ve identified it as such a game changer, I would love to hear more from Cullen, who has been utilizing this device. Cullen, thanks so much for joining us on The Frank & Lizzie Show today.

Thank you for having me on.

Cullen, you’ve been leading wound care with Kane Wound Care, which has more than 50 providers using Swift Medical. What made you decide to bring Swift Medical on board?

At Kane Wound Care, we’re a mobile wound care provider with more than 50 clinicians. As we were growing and scaling our business, we needed standardization across all of our providers so that everybody was assessing and documenting the same way.

The portability of Swift Medical has been integral in our growth because we can give this to all our clinicians. Like you said, they can put it right in their pockets and go to different nursing homes and different homes to evaluate patients. At the end of the day, they can go home, sign on to the Swift online dashboard portal, and review their images and data points, all from the comfort of their own home without the device.

Wow. I’m interested to find out more clinically: how has it made a difference?

We’re able to detect infections faster, monitor wounds objectively, and track them on a week-to-week basis. It allows us to make a better treatment plan at the bedside. Patients have also been enamored by the technology. Everybody wants to see what’s in our pocket. Letting them visually see their wound progress gets them involved in their wound care. As we know, when patients are involved in their wound care, we tend to have better outcomes.

We talked about how Swift Medical helps with documentation and standardization, but infection is one of our biggest hurdles in wound care, obviously. So how exactly does Swift Medical help clinicians catch these infections earlier than traditional methods of the scratch, sniff, and smell?

Great question, Lizzie. As clinicians, early infection detection is critical. That’s where Swift Medical’s combination of AI and Ray imaging has really helped our clinicians at the bedside and made a big difference for us.

Along with thermal imaging and fluorescence imaging, we’re able to see what’s going on with the wound and see whether there’s any delta in the temperature better and faster than we ever could by feeling the wound ourselves.

So subjective.

Yeah, and I’m jealous because the technology is just phenomenal. But let’s break it down a little bit. How does it work in the clinic?

The Swift Ray device does more than just take pictures. With one click of the button, you’re able to get multiple data points. With fluorescence imaging, you can track the biofilm. With thermal imaging, you can track differences in temperature. With that, we can see inflammation that might be underneath the wound that is hidden to the naked eye. At our practice, we like to say we have the power to see the unseen.

That’s awesome.

That’s definitely helpful because making everything as objective as possible in today’s market is critical, particularly when we’re talking about audits and clawbacks and things like that. So the images can pick up on heat and bacterial activity that we might miss otherwise.

Right. Again, the fluorescence imaging, along with thermal imaging and Swift Medical’s AI, alerts our clinicians to certain areas they may be overlooking with the naked eye and nudges them to say, “Hey, maybe this is something you need to look at a little bit further.” Again, it guides our decision-making better at the bedside.

What I like is that those alerts let the clinician know to investigate sooner. Now you don’t have to rely on sending your patient back to the provider and waiting weeks. You can do it at the point of care, and I love that.

That helps with infection prevention and antibiotic stewardship as well.

Wow. That’s great. That early detection really improves outcomes for your practice, right?

Yes. It helps us act earlier, whether that means changing the treatment plan, debriding the wound, or initiating antibiotics. It gives us objective data to work with at the bedside instead of relying on guesswork. That way, we have a better standard of practice.

So that kind of early detection, I would think, really improves outcomes and can reduce complications, admissions, things like that. Do you also use the wound fluorescence technology?

Yes. It absolutely improves our outcomes, and I personally use the device every day in my clinical practice. I believe it’s a powerful tool that we should all have as clinicians. It gives us clear, objective data on a wound at each visit, allows us to avoid hospitalizations, helps our patients heal faster, and generally supports better outcomes.

Scott, Kane Wound Care is just one example. Let’s talk about larger organizations and how their providers manage wounds at a larger level.

With more than 50 clinicians at Kane Wound Care using Swift Medical, the platform supports enterprise-level reporting and analytics and really drives utilization across the organization. It gives leaders data insights to drive quality improvements and compliance tracking.

We have an entire web portal with compliance reporting, patient-specific reporting, data export, and patient reporting. It gives you the opportunity to drill down and find that information.

From a scale perspective, it can go from a single provider up to a 50-provider group. If you have a 100-provider mobile group covering 18 states, or if you’re an enterprise-level IDN, it really scales regardless of size. Each person has a device. It’s the data—the management and presentation of that data—that becomes useful and helps drive efficiencies throughout the organization.

I would have loved that when I was practicing because I covered seven hospitals at one point, and trying to be at all those places and really understand the wounds was difficult. Relying on nursing documentation may not have been that great. The fact that it scales beyond the patient level, from when you’re there at the bedside to something that I, as an administrator, could review in reports, would have been huge.

I also think that, in my role now as a consultant, when we’re doing clinical trials, tracking those outcomes across clinical trials would also be super helpful.

Absolutely. We’re involved in a variety of utilizations. As we talked about in the provider space, we have protection of economics around wastage relative to the skin size and depth. We have the audit protection mechanism because of the consistency of data. You have fluorescence, which, per practice, provides a revenue opportunity for reimbursement separate from the device.

If we pivot to clinical trials, the accuracy of the image still continues. We have a high level of 95% accuracy of wound measurement. If you look at intraoperator variability, it’s 99% because we have standardized schemas and workflows that drive through there.

For clinical trials, it really gives confidence in the data as teams are building these trials. If you’re at multiple sites and have multiple PIs utilizing the system, it scales across clinical trials and gives them very clean, objective data to support their goals.

You know what? All I can think of is what this clinician said earlier—Dr. Armstrong, remember that? He said, “Manage what you treat.” With your device, knowing all that data, we can help manage what we treat.

Let’s talk about what’s most exciting about where wound care is going.

Well, it’s becoming data-driven. You mentioned AI a number of times. We see AI everywhere we go. Certainly at Swift Medical, we utilize AI, but we use it appropriately.

We have one of the largest data sets available. Our artificial intelligence engines are trained on more than 34 million clinically validated images. If we’re prompting you with where we feel the area of the wound is, or what the depth is, it’s because we’ve trained it many millions of times on what that looks like.

Not only do we have a large data set, but it’s validated clinically through the organization. In wound care, using that structure of AI is really becoming data-driven and helping with earlier detection of problems.

It’s not just about new technology. It’s about how the technology is advancing the field and allowing providers to get some of those clinical insights earlier so they can provide faster care to patients. Not different care—the same care, but faster—and help them see things a little bit earlier than they may have otherwise.

After the show is over, I want to see the proof. I tried to be like Scott, and I wore new shoes and rubbed some blisters.

So I want to image the blisters on my feet.

And we can mix it with the old-school smell detection of wounds combined with thermography.

Not with his feet. I’m not doing that.

Well, thank you so much, Scott and Cullen, for coming on The Frank & Lizzie Show and sharing your insights. This has been super valuable. I think this direction is exactly what we need: objective measurements, clean data, and AI-driven solutions are exactly what the future of wound care is going to be.

Yeah. Thank you. And be sure to subscribe to The Frank & Lizzie Show so you can keep up with the innovations coming up. We’ll see you next time on The Frank & Lizzie Show.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Thank you.