Chronic wounds affect nearly 15% of Medicare patients (8.2 million people) and may cost as much as $96.8 billion per year. The most common are not venous or diabetic, even though they are the most often studied in prospective trials. The most common chronic wounds are surgical incisions that dehisce and the “wounds with no name” due to the patients’ underlying medical conditions. That is because wounds are not a disease – they are a symptom. The US Wound Registry (USWR), a 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization, has been a patient registry since 2005. Since 2014, the USWR has been recognized by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as a Qualified Clinical Data Registry (QCDR) that collects medical and/ or clinical data for the purpose of improving the quality of patient care. While we understand that randomized, controlled trials are needed to demonstrate efficacy in a perfect world, real-world patients have an average of 6 serious co-morbid conditions and take 10 medications. These complicated patients are invariably excluded from clinical research studies, which makes it impossible to know what treatments work best … read more