LAUSR

Our regular readers will be familiar with the concept of the importance of data in the evolution of a wound care specialty. It has been the subject of many editorials and publications with the International Wound Journal over the years. As editors, we felt it important to revisit this considering the recent pandemic years. The evolution of wound care as a clinical speciality has been slow at best. Many factors influence this including regional differences, but the ultimate clinical aim remains the same. Data are essential assets in this journey. Sharing of such data is not only important to each patient and clinician but also to the wider clinical community to permit the specialisation of practice. While a multidisciplinary approach is more universally accepted today, the overprotection of the privacy laws regarding patient information, and the current pandemic impacts, have impacted such evolution. Sharing is caring. Most of our patient's love sharing their story (i.e., data). Using technology systems such as “apps,” clinicians can capture large volumes of data and through sophisticated machine-driven analysis techniques provide the transparency of approach to begin to truly understand the areas of focus and change required to standardise the practice. Within the past 10 years, we have seen the emergence of apps in a variety of health care arenas, and within the past 5 years, this includes the simple measurement of wound dimensions. Many of these digital approaches have begun to capture much more wound-related information. Machine-learning models can be trained to analyse tens of millions of patient records, with billions of data points, something which is impossible for a human clinician as they may only see a few tens of thousands of patients in their entire career. The capturing, storing and analysing of this vast data collection are not the issues, there are many technological solutions permitting such activities. Society's challenge is the privacy of such vast data silos. Since much of its pedigree is technological, it exposes such databases to hacking and intrusion.