How Practices are Increasing Access to Physical Therapy through Digital Health

Physical therapy can be both preventative and restorative for a variety of injuries and medical conditions. Doctors will often prescribe physical therapy as a conservative approach to avoid more invasive and expensive surgeries. Also, people may utilize physical therapy to manage chronic pain and improve function after an injury. Currently, there are barriers that hinder the effectiveness of physical therapy, including a shortage of physical therapists/therapy locations, a lack of access or awareness about options, time limitations, and issues around patient adherence. Recently, innovative digital health companies have created platforms to address these barriers, and enhance the effects of pain management through physical therapy. Reflexion, Kaia Health, Hinge Health, Sword, Physera, and Physitrack, are currently considered the leaders in this space.

Some of the companies, including Physitrack, Reflexion, and Physera connect patients to physical therapists digitally and give them access to exercises to treat their conditions. These services give patients the scheduling flexibility to attend physical therapy sessions on demand.^[1] For patients who have constraints preventing them from attending and completing physical therapy in person, these virtual therapy sessions help overcome those barriers. These platforms could also improve the remuneration of physical therapists, helping attract quality students to the profession. Hinge Health and Sword utilize wearable devices to supplement their telemedicine approach,^[4] allowing the physical therapist to make appropriate adjustments to form in real-time.

Perhaps the most interesting is Kaia’s multimodal approach to target the mind-body connection, and their AI tools designed to track biomarkers that will further elucidate patterns through large-scale data analysis.^[3] Digital biomarker technology may provide patients and their doctors with invaluable insights to guide preventative medicine. This is exciting because it takes the implications of digital health technology one-step further from generating effective physical therapy remotely. Kaia Health seeks to also gather knowledge about disease incidence, progression, and outcomes by continually tracking range of motion, balance, and stability. Kaia Health can use this information to direct patients to useful clinical trials, connect patients with health care providers, and track outcomes to help individualize patients’ health care policy plans cutting unnecessary spending in the process.

Digital tools in physical therapy give insight into this ever-evolving intersection of medicine and technology. Research continues to support the use of telehealth tools in alleviating excessive costs in healthcare and freeing time for health care providers to be more effective. A company like Kaia Health shows how we can go even further by implementing AI technology.