Festering wounds can escalate into more pressing health conditions quickly. This is a fact Kathy Piette knows well, and a lack of readily available expertise in wound treatment led her to found Savannah-based Corstrata in an attempt to bridge a gap.
The company recently celebrated a decade of service, and Piette attributes some of that longevity to the fact that the entrepreneurship cycle is typically longer in the health care industry than in other verticals. The other reason is that Corstrata has been able to fill a real need.
“Wounds are not a disease, per se. Wounds are really the implication of multiple chronic conditions,” she said. “As a consequence, nobody owns wound care, and it’s kind of like the Wild West — who really is in charge of wounds?”
Credit: Corstrata
Credit: Corstrata
The company provides nurses specially trained in the area of advanced wound care to work remotely with organizations like hospitals and home health companies, which might not otherwise have access to them.
The remote experience
Piette and her co-founder, Joe Ebberwein, both had experience with remote patient monitoring working in the home health and hospice spaces.
“It was there that we really understood the power that technology could bring to processes. It’s not the technology itself; it’s what the technology enables. We took a model that basically had been in radiology in the early 2000s. Radiologists were never in the right place at the right time. So what happened to them? They’ve become virtualized,” Piette told the AJC. “We’ve done the same thing with a very scarce commodity as well, which are board certified wound nurses.”
Most wound nurses, she said, practice within hospitals, making access difficult for patients outside that setting. Corstrata nurses operate independently within virtual visits.
The company, Piette said, chooses providers with “real world experience” in different care settings. Delivery of care virtually, she said, has allowed for a unique employment opportunity for nurses, and the company maintains a waiting list of interested providers.
Corstrata’s virtual nurses work alongside bedside nurses and physicians, using images and live video visits to assess wounds and ask patients and providers targeted questions. This helps them understand the wound and the factors affecting healing.
Conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure, as well as medications patients are taking, can affect treatment and healing, Piette said. Wounds range from diabetic foot ulcers to venous and arterial ulcers and bed sores.
The result of this virtual contact with a wound nurse is an evidence-based plan of care for each patient, which can prevent extreme outcomes like amputation, sepsis or even death.
Expansion and responsibility
Rural and critical access hospitals that are smaller in size, Piette said, have benefited particularly from the availability of virtual wound care, as have home-based care patients needing hospital-level care.
The company’s pre-COVID launch served to accelerate its growth.
“Finally, the world realized. ‘Oh my goodness, telehealth has a place,’” she said. “That was kind of a pivotal point for us in terms of acceptance, and since then, with the greater acceptance of telehealth, we’ve been building on our customer base.”
A push toward value-based care from entities like commercial payers and Medicare Advantage, she said, has also helped. Corstrata also received support as a portfolio company for the Advanced Technology and Development Center, the technology incubator situated on the Georgia Tech campus.
The company is now serving patients in all 50 states and has its eyes on expanding internationally. A key challenge, Piette said, has been learning to navigate time differences when working with organizations on both coasts. It’s also looking into monetizing the data it’s collected over the years on better care for patients and making that data available to other entities that could use it to improve.
“The care experience is ultimately for the patients, families and the front line clinicians. So you have to stay true to your mission,” she said.
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