Pressure Injury Prevention Strategies: How AI Is Shaping Wound Care

Hospital-acquired pressure injuries (HAPIs) are a massive concern in hospital settings… not to mention, they cost a lot of money. CMS considers Stage III and Stage IV HAPIs to be “never events”—as in, they should never happen. That means they can lead to substantial penalties and lost reimbursement and revenue. They’re also not entirely uncommon; between 5 and 15% of hospital patients got HAPIs in 2024. That makes pressure injury prevention strategies all the more important.

It’s not just the repercussions from CMS that can cause strain to a hospital when HAPIs occur. These wounds are notoriously hard to treat and quite difficult to prevent as well. Not only does it require diligent documentation and monitoring, but it requires staff working collaboratively and takes time to succeed. Wounds can be complex to treat, which only complicates this already delicate process. But patients need practitioners who can successfully help them heal, and clinicians want to provide that to them.

That’s where new tech, like artificial intelligence (AI), comes in. What can be done about limiting, or preventing altogether, HAPIs? There are traditional methods that you should still focus on (they’re basics for a reason), but as technology develops, so do new techniques and strategies.

Let’s look at five ways AI is helping create new pressure injury prevention strategies.

1. Facilitate More Complete Documentation

AI can do a lot of things, and that might seem scary, but its true power lies in helping you, the practitioner, have more time to spend with your patients and a greater ability to focus on their care. Documentation can be a huge time pit for practitioners, with many spending time after their appointments, or even at the very end of the workday, finalizing documentation and making sure all the information is accurate and complete. Practitioners are often focused on entering information into an electronic health record (EHR) during appointments, which means there’s less time to genuinely connect and help the patient.

So, how does AI help bridge this gap and provide more time and more connection to practitioners and patients? Ambient documentation.

Natural language processing ability means that AI can run in the background while an appointment is taking place and process the language to synthesize session notes. This means that practitioners are free to spend their time focused on treating the patient, not stressing about getting all of the information they heard directly into the note. It’s still important to check over the information recorded from the session—that way you can be sure that not only is the content accurate, but it’s including all the highlights that you find most important in tracking the patient’s progress. Even with double-checking the content, this process still saves practitioners time from filling in the documentation in the EHR manually and allows for better connection and focus on the patient.

In the case of HAPIs, accurate documentation can be the evidence a hospital needs that a pressure injury did not form while the patient was at the hospital, and more specifically, that the pressure injury therefore is not a HAPI. For patients with pressure injuries outside of the hospital setting, this can be a key history in determining how and when to change patient treatment.

2. Improve Wound Care Workflow

In wound care, workflow is critical. Not only does a streamlined process need to be in place to help save practitioners time, but it needs to be able to work between clinicians when patients move between specialists or practices. Wound treatment is complex and can be a long process, meaning all tools should be incorporated simply and easily into the workflow process to reduce any complications to the patient’s healing journey.

Clinics should look for AI technology that fits into existing workflows, and, preferably, improves them. Ambient documentation can be offered through a third-party vendor, though some EHRs now include natively-built AI capabilities. If choosing a third party, just make sure the interface with your EHR is smooth and doesn’t lose any detail in the process.

Ambient documentation isn’t the only way AI can fit into your wound care workflow. Some AI tools can help with coding based on information entered into the EHR, and some can make changes to a template automatically. Using predictive analytics and AI’s incredible pattern-matching abilities, there are some tools that allow for increased ability to track healing and catch tricky complications early in the process.

AI can help you determine when patients are at risk for HAPIs, when and where in the facility they happen most often, and how you can adjust your workflow to prevent HAPIs from occurring in the first place. Understanding who is most likely to develop a HAPI allows your team to be specific in your interventions.

Whatever tools you choose, make sure they fit into your workflow and your staff is comfortable using them. Make sure that the double-checking your staff should be doing also doesn’t add time to the workflow.

3. Allow Mobile Documentation and Assessment

Okay, so AI isn’t solely responsible for this one, but it has allowed for more mobile interfaces to become available. Mobile apps have become ubiquitous over the past two decades, and healthcare has not escaped their grasp. Recent years have seen EHRs add portals and mobile app access to allow patients to access their own medical information from home. Telehealth has broadened access to healthcare to patients in rural areas, who have mobility concerns, or who manage chronic pain or illness.

This is one area AI has had a major impact—wound care can be very difficult when the patient is not physically present in the office. As of 2023, about 80% of rural Americans are underserved when it comes to healthcare, meaning treating wounds can be a massively tricky job for millions of Americans. Mobile apps and telehealth can help combat this by making specialist treatment and access to care easier for wound care patients and providers.

AI tools, like those we’ve discussed that can be integrated into your EHR, can make it easier to incorporate images and information from patients into their records in your EHR, or to make better diagnoses when the patient-provided information isn’t presented in the way you’d receive it in the clinic.

When it comes to pressure injury treatment and prevention, mobile documentation and telehealth can help treat patients with less access to wound care specialists, or other medical staff that may be key in providing care. A recent study found that there’s no drop in quality of care when treating diabetic foot ulcers in rural populations by way of telehealth, which may make telehealth a great option for treating diabetic foot ulcers and pressure injuries for those with limited access to medical care.

4. Improve Wound Imaging Capabilities

The right image can replace a thousand words in an EHR. Wound imaging can be critical in treating wounds, especially when more than one provider is involved in the patient’s treatment. Wound imaging allows for more detail than a note in the EHR alone, as well as an easier ability to track wound healing over time.

AI-powered wound imaging is, at this point, almost non-negotiable in a wound care practice. Not only do they allow for the same tracking of wound healing that a simple image would, but there are other key features that AI can help provide. AI can measure wounds more accurately and more quickly than using physical rulers (wounds are rarely regular enough that measuring by ruler is easy), and some AI-powered wound imaging can even measure wounds that wrap around body parts.

One of the best applications for AI is pattern matching—which can be incredibly helpful in understanding how wounds are healing compared to others. With massive databases to compare them to, AI-powered wound imaging can help determine if a wound is healing along the expected timeline or if complications have arisen.

Of course, imaging is only as good as the images it works off of. Always follow best practices to ensure images are consistent and quality. Create protocols, in conjunction with the AI tool that you’ve chosen, around lighting, angle, and distance to assure all images will be high-quality and help provide better patient outcomes. You can use this along with the “Four Eyes” protocol to provide the best information possible for your staff, your AI tools, and your EHR.

Wound imaging can help stage pressure injuries and, along with documentation, help prevent and treat HAPIs. When providers have access to frequent images of the wound as it heals, they can more accurately guide proper treatment options.

5. Reduce Referral Leakage

Like mobile apps, referral leakage isn’t exclusively the stomping ground of AI, but it is made easier with the help of AI tools. Referral leakage (when a patient transitions between providers, resulting in a blind spot) can lose a clinician both revenue from continuing treatment and patient history of the remainder of their wound treatment. This might happen if a patient sees a wound care provider for the initial visit, but returns to their primary care physician for follow up. That means that not only does the wound care specialist lose out on revenue from treating the patient through the healing process, they also have no idea what care the patient receives as their wound continues to heal.

Wound care clinicians are always looking to track outcomes and trends, which is much more difficult when all that information is lost between providers. AI platforms, however, can help with this. When information is entered into a patient’s chart by other providers within the EHR, an AI tool can use that data to continue analysis, even when the wound care provider isn’t the one executing the care.

Better data means more efficient care for patients and easier implementation of best practices. With the help of a common EHR—which often means referring patients within your network—AI tools can make all of this possible. Better patient outcomes, and an overall better patient experience, are possible with the continuity of care provided when clinicians can access the whole history and data from the wound’s treatment.

Pressure injuries can be tricky to treat, but the ability to track their healing longitudinally gives clinicians more information to treat and prevent future pressure injuries and HAPIs. The more data collected, the better our picture of the entire wound healing process, allowing more conclusions to be drawn from that information. At a facility or network level, this tracking can allow you to better anticipate the needs of the patients you see when it comes to pressure injuries.

Pressure Injury Prevention Strategies Are Easier with AI Tools

With all of the benefits of AI tools, and how they interface with your EHR and your team’s workflows, better care for patients’ wounds and the ability to enact pressure injury prevention strategies is possible. HAPIs are bad news for hospitals, making prevention key overall. AI’s ability to image wounds, track healing over time, access and process large amounts of data to change workflows, and improve your team workflows means it’s a critical tool in defining and refining pressure injury prevention strategies.