Why I joined WoundScribe.AI
Recognizing the moments of clarity that life provides can be challenging because of all the existing background noise that often distracts from the present situation. One such moment of clarity occurred for me in 2005. It was a day like many others, spent treating patients in my independently owned wound clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, and watching a familiar and unsettling routine unfold.
As was typical, ambulances transported patients from Skilled Nursing Facilities in for wound care visits. This was often physically demanding and disruptive for the patient and facility. The financial cost for each visit included more than just the use of an ambulance. Staff from the respective facility would have to accompany the patient, taking man hours away from the facility, where help was always at a premium. After their appointments, patients often remained in our waiting room, sometimes for hours, until transportation services returned to take them back to their facility. On more than one occasion, my staff and I stayed well past closing time simply because a patient’s ride had not yet arrived. The inefficiency was obvious, but what struck me more deeply was the human cost. These were not acute emergencies. These were people navigating a system that required them to be transported, parked, and retrieved just to receive ongoing care.
That daily scene became the quiet catalyst for what would later become one of the country’s first mobile wound care services: Wound Care on Wheels. The logic was straightforward. If patients could not reliably get to care, then care needed to go to them. It would make wound management easier for the patients, facilities, and healthcare system. As a bonus, the continuity of care that was part of the concept provided greater efficiency all around. Consider, however, the time frame when this care model was implemented. Electronic Health Records were still in their infancy, not all were web-based, and telemedicine was still not a reality.
It is Applied Intelligence that is transforming clinical decision-making, documentation, and outcomes. This perspective highlights why scalable experience - not more products - will define the future of wound care delivery.
At the time, the challenges were hardly unique to Jacksonville. Across the United States, access to healthcare, particularly specialized wound care, has long been constrained by geography, staffing limitations, and fragmented care delivery models. Patients in skilled nursing facilities, assisted living communities, group homes, and home health settings often waited weeks to be evaluated by a wound specialist. In wound care, delays matter. “Time is tissue” is not a slogan. It is a clinical reality. The longer a wound goes without appropriate assessment and intervention, the greater the risk of complications, infection, and amputation.
Mobile wound care model was an attempt to solve the access problem, but it exposed a different set of challenges.
Running a mobile service required navigating logistics that traditional clinics rarely face. There was no prior business model or “blueprint” to borrow from. Staffing was inconsistent. Charting was labor-intensive and time-consuming. Automation tools, such as wound imaging and measurement, that would reduce administrative burden simply did not exist at the time. Telemedicine was in its infancy and was more of a futuristic concept than reality. Billing posed yet another obstacle. There were no standard coding pathways for mobile wound care services, making reimbursement unpredictable and often unsustainable. (CMS did not know what to make of our practice model, and we were on a pre-payment review for approximately 18 months). Clinical decision-making depended almost entirely on the experience of the individual clinician in the field, with little support for standardization or shared learning across care settings. In many regards, I was the rate-limiting factor and had no access to the technologies of the present.
The concept of mobile wound care was sound. The infrastructure was not.
By 2005, I had already spent nearly a decade in the emerging specialty of wound care, having entered the field in 1996. I had witnessed waves of innovation come and go. Early in my career, alginates were considered cutting-edge. Later, advances such as negative pressure wound therapy and cellular and tissue-based products made a meaningful impact. Over time, however, the industry became saturated with variations of the same solutions. Conference after conference, exhibit halls filled with similar products, often skin substitutes, are marketed as breakthroughs. Most addressed what clinicians should apply to a wound. Very few addressed how to understand the wound itself, how to identify the underlying pathology, or how to customize care to expedite healing.
Over the years after that, I continued to observe a persistent gap in wound care education and experience. There is no formal training pathway for wound care, and clinicians who choose this specialty often learn through trial, error, and exposure that varies widely from one environment to another. The result is significant variability in care and outcomes. What wound care has historically lacked is not effort or dedication, but a way to scale experience itself.
When I was first introduced to WoundScribe, it did not feel like just another technology. It felt like the missing piece. It felt familiar. I also wished I had access to this platform back in 2005, as the outcome of Wound Care on Wheels would have likely been one of unparalleled success, instead of another “what could have been” tale of woe.
What I saw in WoundScribe is the accumulation of knowledge through experience, applied to real-world clinical decision-making at a scale no single clinician could achieve alone. The platform’s ability to automate wound documentation, assist with differential diagnoses, support more efficient treatment decisions, and reduce the gap between novice and experienced clinicians immediately stood out. For the first time, I could clearly see how the operational and clinical barriers that limited my mobile wound care efforts years earlier could be addressed.
Instead of charting consuming clinical time, documentation could happen in the background. Instead of decisions relying solely on memory and individual exposure, clinicians could draw from thousands, eventually millions, of prior cases. Instead of isolated practice, there was the possibility of true "co-care" for clinicians, where judgment is informed, sharpened, and supported by collective experience.
What ultimately distinguishes WoundScribe is that it is not Artificial Intelligence in the abstract sense. It is Applied Intelligence. It embeds knowledge into workflow, brings clarity to complexity, and creates consistency across settings where wounds are managed. It does not replace clinical judgment. It enhances it. It addresses not only what treatment is applied, but how and why decisions are made, enabling clinicians to move toward more predictable and timely healing.
The future of wound care will not be defined by another product on an exhibit floor. It will be defined by our ability to understand wounds better, sooner, and more consistently, wherever patients happen to be. For the first time in my career, I can see that future clearly.
And this time, the timing is right.
Desmond Bell, DPM, CWS
President, WoundScribe AI
