Managing Wounds vs. Healing Them

Dr. Desmond Bell, President of WoundScribe.ai and founder of the Save a Leg, Save a Life Foundation, opens the Below The Knee Signal Interview Series with a blunt thesis: wound care has been optimized for managing wounds when the real goal is healing them. Twenty-five years in limb salvage — and applying his first cellular tissue product back in October 2000 — gives the critique weight from inside the specialty. ### The market correction Bell sees On cellular tissue products, Bell argues they were designed as adjunctive therapy — one tool in the toolbox, never a revenue stream. What critics call a crisis, he calls a market correction: utilization returning to responsible levels where the therapy earns its place. He traces the evidence gap to four honest causes: - No formal training pathway for wound care specialists - Uneven study quality across the literature - Sponsor bias in trial design and reporting - Economics driving utilization ahead of outcomes His fix is to incentivize innovation and outcomes rather than simply performing procedures. Each wound, he notes, is as unique as a fingerprint — its own pathology and physiology, even on the same patient. ### Where AI actually helps Bell's on-the-record prediction: within two years, AI adoption will make today's approach look archaic. He points to differential diagnosis support, smarter diagnostics, guided product selection, and predictive tools that expedite trial results. That vision maps directly onto the WoundScribe platform — AI-powered wound imaging, ambient AI scribing, charting and coding inside an AI-powered EMR for wound care, a healing analytics dashboard, and patient engagement. The full interview was published June 30, 2026 by Below the Knee, a wound care intelligence platform covering limb salvage and foot and ankle.