Wound Care Collaborative Community: Post-Summit Interview With Karen Cross

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HMP Global’s Symposium on Advanced Wound Care (SAWC) Spring | Wound Healing Society (WHS) partnered with the Wound Care Collaborative Community (WCCC) to host the inaugural Driving Innovation in Wound Care Summit, addressing public policy challenges related to assuring patients receive access to wound-healing therapies.

Transcript:

Karen Cross, MD, PhD, FRCSC; CEO, Mimosa Diagnostics

I'm Karen Cross. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Mimosa Diagnostics. I'm also the lead for the Wound Innovation Collaborative in Nova Scotia, Canada.

I think what's really different is the stakeholders that are at the table. Clearly, I'm representing industry, but we also have the FDA and people from reimbursement as well as all the clinicians. Having that group of people come together to define what's important to the clinician and what's important for patient outcomes in that aligned fashion really allows innovation to move forward faster.

It also helps us in industry to say this is what's valuable, this is how the FDA will perceive that, and bring our innovations to market more quickly. I'm a plastic surgeon by background, and I'm a practicing wound care clinician in Canada. The one thing I was really impressed by about the summit, with the industry hat as well as the clinical hat, was again that capacity to understand what other people are doing in the sector and bring people together to align in a very cohesive way to elevate the standard of care. And you don't see that. I think part of the problem with why we haven't made advances in this sector is there have been a lot of messages in one way and a message in a different way, but if we align that message and we come together to say this is what's really important, with consensus guidelines, with guidance towards the FDA, it just really elevates the space. I think what the WCCC is doing differently than other associations is elevating that standard of care and setting the bar; this is what you have to achieve in order to truly benefit the patient.

I think what's important to highlight is that I'm Canadian. And so why would a Canadian company, why would a Canadian clinician participate in a group like this? I would say that the learnings that are occurring in the WCCC, although they're for the benefit of American patients and American clinicians, that knowledge can be directly translated into other countries. We've already taken so much knowledge, through Vickie Driver and Alisha Oropallo and everyone who sits at that table, to say how can we change wound care in Canada. It's sort of inspired a lot of what's happening in our own country, and especially within the province of Nova Scotia with the Wound Innovation Collaborative.

And so those key learnings are actually not just for here ,but I think they'll also expand internationally, and I just want to congratulate the group. Thank you for allowing us to participate and contribute to the WCCC.