CEO, Florida Wound Care Doctors

LONGWOOD – Note to anyone who might need to motivate Walter Conlan to accomplish a task: Tell him he can’t, and then get out of his way.

That is what happened back in 1986 when Conlan was a senior psychology major at Emory University in Atlanta. He was planning to be a clinical psychologist and was weighing his options to study for his PhD. An advisor at Emory told him he would not be able to get into a doctorate program and that he should set his sights on a career in social work. That was all the impetus Conlan needed. “Having someone tell me I couldn’t do something ticked me off a little,” he said.

Not long after, Conlan was “in the stacks at the library” and “it became clear to me what I needed to do,” he said, describing his realization as an epiphany. “I started taking pre-med classes, and had to take an extra (post- baccalaureate) year. ... I got As in everything,” he remembered. “I had to wait a year to take the MCAT and interview for med school” and he took a job counseling adolescents in the meantime, he said.

Then he was accepted at Thomas Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, not far from where he and his younger brother were raised by his mother, who was widowed when Conlan was just 5 years old. After earning his MD in 1992, Conlan began a four-year residency in physical medicine and rehabilitation at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago at the Northwestern University Medical Center.

When he was in med school he thought about specializing in psychiatry, but soon realized that was not his cup of tea. “I wound up choosing physical medicine rehab because it really fit the biocycle social model” and it combined components from psychology, neurology and orthopedics, he said. A stint working with patients and colleagues at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio reinforced that decision, he said.

Conlan’s decision to move to Florida was made easier because his wife, Kristin, was from the Gulf coast town of Bradenton. They were introduced by her brother in 1989 and “we fell in love on our second date,” he said. They married the following year. Kristin had graduated from Rollins College in Winter Park, and that familiarity, combined with her family ties, persuaded the Conlans that their future was in Florida.

In 1996 Conlan joined a rehabilitation practice with Michael Creamer, MD, whom he had met at a conference. After a few years in private practice, Conlan had “another epiphany. I realized that wound care was just something I was meant to do. It is very multi-disciplinary,” he said.

He founded Florida Wound Care Doctors in 2000, where he is CEO at central Florida’s only medical practice that concentrates full-time on wound care. The home office is in Longwood at the Wound Care & Hyperbaric Medicine Center at South Seminole Hospital. But he and the two other doctors and ARNPs on his staff travel between several outpatient hospital-based wound care centers, including Health Central in Ocoee, Dr. P Phillips in Orlando, and Osceola Regional Wound Care Center in Kissimmee, where is Conlan is medical director. Soon he will be medical director of Orlando Health’s Wound Healing Center at Lucerne Hospital.

About half of Conlan’s patients are diabetics whose circulatory complications inhibit healing. Others have venous ulcers, post-operative wounds, and pressure ulcers. A small percentage are acute injuries, like burns, he said. “Most people we see have wounds that are about a month old. We’re a tertiary referral.”

Conlan is involved in several clinical trials and research, including one for vacuum assisted closure of large volume wounds. “We just finished our involvement in a study for SNaP®, which is a different kind of big negative pressure therapy that heals about twice as fast,” he said. “The only one that has had clinical trials is the VAC,” he said. “SNaP® is the first one that actually looks at it versus the standard of care,” he said.

Soon, Conlan said, he will be involved in a clinical trial that uses stem cells from the placenta to treat diabetic foot ulcers. “I’m one of the medical advisors and am helping to set it up. It has tremendous potential,” he said.

“My biggest goal is to dramatically decrease the incidence of amputation from diabetes,” Conlan said, and to further that pursuit he is working to secure a charter for a community chapter of SALSAL – Save A Leg, Save A Life – whose mission is to reduce the number of lower extremity amputations for patients with diabetes and peripheral arterial disease.

Conlan also makes time to volunteer at two clinics that serve uninsured and indigent patients, Destiny Shepherd’s Hope Health Center and the Mark Dogoli Medical Center.

But Conlan doesn’t skimp on his recreational and family time. He, Kristin and their 16-year-old son Alex have a weekend home on Anna Maria Island near Bradenton. And during the summer, they spend a great deal of time with extended family in Beach Haven, N.J. He paddle boards and surfs at both coastal homes, and Alex is an Opti Laser sailor competing on the national level.

Back home in Winter Park, the Conlans enjoy cooking with home-grown herbs and frolicking with their 9-year-old yellow lab, Sandy.

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