If you're running a primary care clinic, podiatry practice, or general surgery office, you've likely noticed the steady stream of wound care referrals leaving your practice each month. Those patients aren't just disappearing—they're representing a significant revenue opportunity and a gap in the continuity of care your practice could be filling.
The numbers tell the story. The United States has an estimated 8.2 million patients with chronic wounds, with the population aging and diabetes prevalence continuing to climb. The wound care market is fragmented: too many patients bounce between wound centers, hospital-based clinics, and specialty practices, losing continuity and creating administrative friction for referring physicians. Most critically for your bottom line, the practices that have successfully built wound care programs—whether they started with 2-3 patients or scaled to managing dozens of active cases—report that wound care became one of their most predictable, highest-margin service lines within 18 months.
But starting a wound care program isn't intuitive. It requires deliberate infrastructure planning, staff training, clinical discipline, and billing accuracy from day one. Get any one of those components wrong, and you'll either face denials that tank your margins or avoid seeing patients altogether because the logistics feel too complex.
Over the past several years, we've worked with dozens of practices—from solo practitioners to multi-provider clinics—through the journey of launching wound care services. What follows is the roadmap we've learned works.
Step 1: Assess Your Current Referral Leakage
Before you build anything, you need to quantify the opportunity. Pull your referral patterns from the past 12 months. How many of your patients are being sent to external wound care centers? What's the clinical presentation of those cases? Are they diabetic foot ulcers, surgical site infections, venous insufficiency wounds, or a mix?
Document the patient volume and the referral destinations. This tells you three things: the size of your addressable market, the clinical competencies you'll need to develop, and the local competitors you'll be displacing. In most markets we've seen, a mid-sized primary care practice is referring out 8-15 wound patients per month. For a podiatry practice, that number can be higher.
This audit also helps you identify which cases are currently falling through the cracks—patients with minor wounds who don't quite warrant an external referral but are also not being managed optimally in your office. Those are often your lowest-hanging fruit for early case volume.
Step 2: Clinical Training and Credentialing
Your physicians and advanced practice providers will need structured training in wound assessment, treatment planning, and biologic application. Don't skip this step assuming you already know how to manage wounds. Clinical wound care has evolved significantly in the past decade, particularly around the integration of advanced biologics and the specific protocols required for biologics like Kerecis fish skin grafts and SYLKE spider silk dressings.
Several certifications carry weight with payers and with patients. The Certified Wound Specialist (CWS) credential, offered by the American Academy of Wound Management, is the gold standard. The Certified Wound Care Specialist (CWCS) through the Wound Care Education Institute is another respected option. Neither is mandatory to practice, but having at least one certified clinician on your team signals competency to your referral sources and simplifies insurance conversations.
Beyond formal certification, arrange hands-on training sessions with your product distributors. At Sunspot Medical, we schedule in-person or virtual training sessions to walk your clinical team through proper assessment, debridement protocols, biologic selection criteria, and application techniques. This isn't optional—the difference between a successful biologic application and a failed one often hinges on proper preparation and technique. Budget 4-6 hours for this training per clinician.
Step 3: Build Your Wound Care Formulary
You won't start with biologics. Your formulary needs a tiered architecture that moves patients up in complexity and cost as needed.
Base tier: conventional dressings. Stock standard alginates, foam dressings, gauze with antimicrobials, and antimicrobial ointments. These handle 60-70% of minor wounds and serve as your entry point for patient assessment.
Intermediate tier: advanced conventional products. Hydrogels, silver-impregnated dressings, enzymatic debriders, and negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) equipment. This is where you handle moderate wounds and begin demonstrating value beyond what primary dressing care alone can achieve. Many payers routinely cover these modalities when documentation is clean.
Advanced tier: biologics. This is where Kerecis fish skin grafts and SYLKE spider silk dressings come in. These products significantly accelerate healing in non-responsive wounds and are particularly powerful when you have robust documentation showing failed conservative care. Not every wound needs a biologic, but having them in your formulary allows you to offer the most advanced options available to patients who qualify.
Don't stock everything at once. Start with 10-12 products across all three tiers. As you develop case volume and confidence, expand strategically based on which products your team uses most frequently.
Step 4: Supply Chain and Inventory Management
Biologics require temperature control and careful storage. Kerecis products, for example, require specific refrigeration protocols and have defined shelf lives. Before you order your first case, ensure your practice has appropriate cold storage capacity—a standard pharmaceutical refrigerator, not a kitchen unit. Your team needs clear protocols for inventory tracking, expiration date monitoring, and reordering.
Establish a relationship with a distributor who will support your program. This isn't just transactional. You want a partner who can help with staff training, provide clinical documentation support, troubleshoot denials, and ensure reliable supply of products without unnecessary downtime. That's where we step in at Sunspot Medical—we're here for the entire journey, not just the order fulfillment.
Set up a basic inventory log. Track what you ordered, what you used, what expired, and what your cost-to-case ratio looks like. This data becomes essential when you evaluate program profitability and forecast future purchasing.
Step 5: Billing Infrastructure and Training (Do This First)
Here's the mistake we see most often: clinicians start seeing wound care patients before the billing team understands wound care coding. Six weeks later, they're drowning in denials because documentation didn't support the codes submitted, or the wrong codes were used entirely.
Wound care involves multiple CPT codes and HCPCS codes that must be understood and applied correctly. The codes vary by complexity level, whether you're performing debridement, the depth of the wound, and the products applied. Your billing team needs to understand at least the following:
- CPT 97597-97598: Debridement (non-selective and selective)
- CPT 99203-99205: Office visit complexity codes (wound care visits are often higher complexity)
- HCPCS codes for specific biologic products (these vary and change)
- Documentation requirements for each code: wound measurements, location, type, depth, signs of infection, treatment plan
Schedule a training session with your billing team and consider having your distributor participate. We've seen practices recover thousands of dollars in previously denied claims simply by re-billing with correct coding and documentation after training.
Step 6: Documentation Protocols
This is non-negotiable. Every wound visit must include standardized documentation that supports your clinical and billing decisions.
At minimum, document:
- Wound location, dimensions (length x width x depth), and surface area
- Wound base appearance, edges, surrounding skin condition
- Exudate type and amount
- Signs of infection or other complications
- Treatment provided (debridement type, dressings applied, biologics used)
- Patient tolerance and wound response
- Next visit plan and expected outcomes
Ideally, photograph every wound at baseline and at each visit. Wound photography (taken with standardized lighting and ruler placement) is powerful documentation for payers, particularly when you're seeking authorization for advanced biologics. It also gives you objective evidence of healing progress or lack thereof.
Create a simple wound assessment template in your EHR. Use it for every visit. Consistency matters—it makes billing easier and demonstrates that you're following a rigorous clinical protocol.
Step 7: Patient Flow and Treatment Planning
Design your patient flow before your first wound care appointment. You'll need dedicated slots in your schedule, ideally 30-45 minutes for initial assessments and 20-30 minutes for follow-ups. Wound care isn't fast—rushing patients increases the risk of missed assessments and documentation gaps.
Most wounds require weekly follow-ups for the first 4-6 weeks, then every 2-3 weeks if healing is progressing. Build this into your scheduling assumptions. If you're planning to manage 20 active wound patients, you're likely committing to 15-20 wound care visits per week.
Establish clear treatment plans in writing. Document the wound classification, the expected treatment course, the anticipated healing timeline, and the milestones that would trigger escalation or specialist referral. This clarity helps with patient expectations and gives your billing documentation teeth.
Step 8: Marketing and Referral Source Development
Your current referring physicians—the ones currently sending patients to external wound centers—need to know you're now accepting wound care cases. This isn't subtle. Make calls, send letters, attend local medical society meetings, and have your physicians directly reach out to their referral sources.
Position wound care as a continuity and quality play, not as an aggressive price grab. "We wanted to keep our diabetic patients closer to home while they heal" lands differently than "we're now offering wound care." Offer to receive patients directly without formal referral paperwork to reduce friction.
Consider starting with a closed loop: invite your top 3-5 referring physicians to send you their next wound care patients, get excellent results, and let those results drive word-of-mouth expansion. This is more reliable than a broad launch.
Setting Realistic Revenue Expectations
A well-managed wound care patient, seen weekly for 12 weeks with appropriate documentation and coding, generates approximately $2,000-$4,500 in professional revenue (depending on your payer mix) plus product costs. If you're managing the product cost efficiently, margins are strong.
The real wealth isn't in the first wound. It's in the systematic capacity to manage 20-40 active cases at any given time, with new patients flowing in as others heal. Once you're at that capacity, wound care becomes a predictable $80,000-$200,000+ annual service line depending on case volume and complexity.
The path to that capacity typically takes 12-18 months. Expect slow growth in months 1-3, then acceleration as your team gains confidence and your reputation spreads. Don't try to force 40 patients in month two—you'll fail at documentation and create denials.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
Starting too big. "We'll handle everything from simple ulcers to complex surgical reconstructions." No. Start with diabetic foot ulcers or post-operative wounds. Master those. Expand later.
Skipping billing training. We mentioned this, but it deserves repeating. This is the single biggest reason practices fail to capture the revenue their wound care patients generate.
Poor documentation discipline. Even great clinicians sometimes struggle with wound care documentation rigor. Make templates non-optional. Audit documentation monthly. Poor records kill revenue and denials, which demoralize your team.
Underestimating advanced biologics in your initial formulary. Many practices think "we'll just do conventional care and NPWT." But if you can't offer Kerecis or SYLKE when a patient truly needs it, you're leaving healing potential (and revenue) on the table. Have these options available from the start.
How Sunspot Medical Supports Your Program
You don't have to navigate this alone. At Sunspot Medical, we've built our entire company around the idea that wound care programs succeed when they have the right partner. We provide product selection guidance, staff training, payer support for pre-authorizations, documentation resources, billing troubleshooting, and ongoing clinical updates as evidence evolves. We also stock Kerecis fish skin grafts and SYLKE spider silk dressings specifically because these products represent the clinical and financial value proposition that justifies advanced wound care programs in primary care and specialty practices.
When you're building your program, we're building it with you. That commitment is what separates a distributor from a true partner.
The Bottom Line
Launching a wound care program requires structure, training, and patience. It's not a quick revenue win. But for practices willing to build it right—with proper clinical training, billing rigor, and documentation discipline—it becomes one of the most rewarding and profitable service lines available. You'll heal more patients, keep them closer to home, and generate sustainable revenue in the process. That's the opportunity in front of you.