The Wound Care Open Data Standard (WCODS) is a community-driven effort to create a shared, interoperable specification for documenting, exchanging, and analyzing wound care data.
Our goal is to establish a transparent, flexible, and open framework that can be adopted by clinicians, researchers, payers, software vendors, and regulators to improve outcomes and accelerate innovation in wound care.
- Define a common vocabulary for wound care concepts (e.g., wound type, stage, location, size, healing trajectory).
- Provide a structured data model for interoperability across electronic health records (EHRs), research databases, and registries.
- Support both clinical care workflows (point of care documentation) and research/analytics use cases (real-world evidence, registries, payer reporting).
- Ensure open access to the specification while maintaining flexibility for vendors and contributors.
To ensure maximum interoperability and scalability, the WCODS specification will be implemented in:
- JSON → human- and machine-readable format for interoperability, APIs, and lightweight data exchange.
- Parquet → columnar, compressed format optimized for large-scale analytics, registries, and cloud storage.
This dual-format approach allows easy adoption across both clinical software systems and analytics pipelines.
Wound care data is often siloed, inconsistent, and difficult to compare across settings. By creating an open standard:
- Clinicians gain more consistent documentation tools.
- Researchers gain better data for comparative effectiveness studies.
- Payers and policymakers gain clearer insights into outcomes and costs.
- Patients ultimately benefit from more effective, evidence-driven care.
We welcome contributions from clinicians, researchers, software developers, standards experts, and industry partners.
Please see CONTRIBUTING.md (to be created) for guidelines on:
- How to propose changes or extensions to the specification.
- Coding/documentation standards.
- Review and approval process.
If you are new to GitHub collaboration, check out the GitHub Getting Started Guide.
This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.
You are free to use, modify, and distribute this project under the terms of the license. See LICENSE for details.
We intend to build a transparent governance model that balances clinical expertise, technical standards, and real-world implementation needs.
Stay tuned for details on steering groups, working groups, and release schedules.
- v0.1 (Initial Draft): Define core wound descriptors.
- v0.2: Add patient-level metadata, treatment categories, and outcomes.
- v0.3: Extend to support advanced analytics (risk adjustment, registries, payer reporting).
- v1.0: Stable release for implementation in pilot systems.
💡 If you’re interested in collaborating, please open an issue or start a discussion.