BOSTON – Partners HealthCare has launched a pilot project aimed at providing better care for patients with leg wounds. The goal is to make it possible for a limited number of wound-care specialists to examine and treat more home health patients. The answer could be a cell phone camera.

The goal of the study, which started at the beginning of September with 34 patients, is to have the cameras in use for the entire patient load.

Partners has about 20 visiting nurses who each call on four to five patients per day. The patient load is high – about 500 altogether in a 30-mile radius of Boston. Leg wounds are common among patients diagnosed with diabetes. The right treatment at the right time is essential for healing. The visiting nurses don't have the expertise in caring for wounds that an enterostomal therapy nurse has. The specially trained ETNs take up to 15 years to train. They are in short supply. Partners has two ENTs on staff, and they spend most of their time at the hospitals. The cell phone digital photo is geared at providing expertise for home-care patients who might be miles away.

Using a Motorola MPX220 Smartphone, with a built-in digital camera, visiting nurses take pictures of the wounds. The phones automatically upload the photos to the Web application for the specialist to examine and develop a treatment plan.

"The device needed to kick off the transmission on its own," said Doug McClure, corporate manager for technology services, telemedicine for Partners.

Partners Telemedicine, a division of Partners HealthCare, is undertaking the new cell phone pilot, which grew out of a three-year study in which the visiting nurses took digital photos and mailed them to the ETN. The two would then discuss the best course of treatment. The process took about 2 1/2 days. The new pilot using the cell phone and Web application takes about 20 minutes.

It's important to have the right treatment, McClure said, and it is also critical to proper healing to treat the wound as soon as possible. So, cutting the consultation time to just a few minutes translates into better care for the patient.

Andrew Needleman, managing partner of Claricode, developed the application for Partners. Newton, Mass.-based Claricode customizes software exclusively for healthcare providers.

McClure and Needleman figured a cell phone camera could help cut the time to treatment, but they had to wait a couple of years for the cell phone technology to catch up.

Even today, questions remain about whether the picture quality of the cell phone will be sufficient to diagnose wounds properly, McClure said. However, with the development of much more processing power and simpler programming interfaces, Needleman is confident cell phones are going to play a major role in application development for healthcare and other industries.

A 2 plus megapixel phone camera is in the works, and it is likely to be a marked improvement over the 1.3 megapixel camera Partners uses today.

"In five years they'll be as powerful as computers," Needleman predicted. "There's going to be an ah-ah point at some iteration," he said. That's the point at which we'll roll this thing out to everybody."