Challenges in Physical Therapy and Solutions (Article 5 in series)

Authors: Kalpana S Mair (B.P.T), Sushrut J Mair.

In these series of articles we would like to present and discuss a modular physical therapy biofeedback platform developed by us, which, in our opinion, can be an invaluable daily practice tool for therapists. The platform has been prototyped using the latest mature and proven technologies in the field of electronics and mobile device software. This is the fifth article where we discuss benefits of the platform in helping to meet challenges head on.

Physical therapists today navigate a tough operating environment. There are enough daily challenges for a therapist to face down and surmount, leaving very little time for them to plan anything for uplifting their profession and patient experience. This is true for all types of practice — whether in a clinic, home care or academia. Strategic concerns take a backseat to tactical priorities.

A — Key challenges faced by therapists having their private practice:

A1. How can I ensure happy and satisfied patients and referrals?

A2. How can I maintain a high level of patient engagement during their therapy?

A3. How do I grow my practice (and income)?

B — Key challenges faced by therapists in academia:

B1. What can I do to increase my institution’s profile and reputation?

B2. How can I engage in a meaningful way with the professional world (practicing therapists)?

Most therapists are already aware of the above questions plaguing them at one level or the other. What they sorely need is an all-round low-friction and low-cost way of addressing them. Take A above for example:

A1. How can I ensure happy and satisfied patients and referrals? The best way to achieve this is having in-place treatment regimens that offer faster and sustained relief as a differentiator from others. The quicker patients are back to their normal life, the happier they would be.

A2. How can I maintain a high level of patient engagement during their therapy? Keep them motivated enough at each stage so that their commitment doesn’t go down.

A3. How do I grow my practice (and income)? It follows that if the above two are taken care of, this one is a natural progression.

Now take B:

B1. What can I do to increase my institution’s profile and reputation? One great way to do this is to produce evidence backed new and/or improved therapy regimens.

B2. How can I engage in a meaningful way with the professional world? By publishing peer-acceptable, objective evidence-heavy research that can support the new or improved treatment regimens. If the new regimens can be easily and quickly disseminated amongst the practicing therapists, then this is extremely valuable and will be highly appreciated.

We have designed and prototyped the SVPT platform to cater to the above challenges. It is a biofeedback therapy platform that has been engineered to provide the aformentioned solutions. A quick brief on how it helps:

A1 — SVPT provides objective biofeedback data that is stored and available historically. It has a mechanism in place that can be extended to draw linkages between a patient’s condition and therapy progression. Such data in turn would be used to provide analysis of best therapy regimen sequences for a given patient profile and condition.

A2 — SVPT gamifies therapy experience for the patient with micro goals to be achieved in each session. It has a concept of thresholded goals that help in maintaining patient interest and motivation.

A3 — A practice utilizing the SVPT platform is able to demonstrate the above two very apparently and positively impacts practice growth.

B1 — SVPT natively supports evidence backed therapy. As previously mentioned, support in SVPT of linkage between patient condition, profile and therapy helps in building improved and/or new regimens.

B2 — The data and analysis that SVPT provides can be used to publish authorative research. Since therapists also use the exact same platform, dissemination is friction-free.

Interested in knowing more? Take a look at our previous articles:

Article 1 — discusses the importance of biofeedback therapy and how SVPT helps.

Article 2 -introduces the SVPT platform and details it out.

Article 3 — describes how a therapy is managed using the SVPT platform, the therapist & patient experience and how data is collected.

Article 4 — discusses feedback by users received from the field and new features we brought in to address those.

If this has piqued your curiosity, do get in touch with us. We would love to discuss SVPT and its possibilities with you!