Painful and multi-billion dollar problem
More than 10 million people suffer from musculoskeletal (MSK) injuries every year in the USA. Patients have to bear physical, mental, and financial pain due to loss of work and pay. On the other hand, companies also face resource shortages and spend billions on compensating for their employees' injuries and loss of time.
The top reasons why such injuries happen and take longer to heal are lack of education and patients’ active participation in their recovery.
0M
work-related injuries happened in the USA, in 2019, National Safety Council.
$0B
in direct financial costs to employers resulted from MSK injuries in 2019.
0%
of all job-related injuries were musculoskeletal injuries in 2021.
The Challenge
The orthopedic, sports medicine, and physical therapy providers struggle to improve patients' behavior to comply with physical therapy routines correctly and adequately when not at the clinic. When at home, many patients fail to take good care of themselves actively, do their routine exercises, and check with providers as advised. In addition, every patient and their injuries are different, and the path to recovery is also different. Along with the patients, the companies that employ them also suffer from continuous loss of productivity and money.
PhysioOutcomes team understood and empathized with the above challenges and partnered with Rapidops to discover, design, and deliver a mobile-first and HIPAA compliant MSK recovery platform to improve patients’ participation in their recovery with hyper-personalized education and connected care.
Untangling the patients’ and providers’ journey
We identified technological, emotional, and educational challenges in the prevention and treatment of MSK injuries. After extensive research and multiple sessions with stakeholders, the Rapidops team came up with a deep understanding of patients’ and doctors’ pain points, journeys, and expectations. We found that patients' behaviors can be improved with continuous education, engagement, and personalized connection with their providers in a friendly setting. On the other hand, while providers wanted to help patients personally, they had to be productive to help more patients; hence, they could not manually engage with each patient.
With insights into what the end-user needs and PhysioOutcomes wants to achieve, we defined the platform opportunity, user expectations, and overall execution strategy.
Improving patient recovery, one conversation at a time
The target users of this platform ranged from GenZ to Babyboomers. It was clear that the user experience was imperative to the platform’s success. We concluded that smartphone users of all ages were hooked to messaging apps, and we decided to bank on this friendly and familiar habit. So, we turned the recovery process into an engaging chat conversation between patients and doctors. We planned to develop a native mobile app for patients and providers to exchange messages, videos, images, documents, and reminders. The providers can keep patients on track with readymade, automated, and personalized content for each unique condition and recovery path.
The MVP prototype allowed us to validate every user touchpoint, discover new requirements, and design the platform that enabled "right" experiences and allowed PhysioOutcomes to scale as a business.
Engineering Breakthroughs
PhysioOutcomes wanted to offer this platform to many providers using the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, and it was also planning to launch more add-ons and apps on the same platform. The platform also had to be HIPAA-ready from day-0, and it must offer an extensive library of pre-built content for each MSK condition - HD videos, images, surveys, and more that providers can instantly use.
Rapidops's engineering team developed a cloud-native and multi-tenant platform architecture. We implemented many patterns such as microservices, API-first, Content Delivery Network (CDN), containerization to make the platform scalable, reliable, and extendable. We carefully picked the modern tech stack that is fast, agile, cost-effective, and aligned with the core platform needs.
Enable every orthopedic to positively impact the way patients and employees live, work and recover using innovative emerging technologies.
Automating the end-to-end patient journey
Providers do not have much time to engage with each patient manually because of the low doctor-patient ratio. So, we built a unique pathway automation engine from scratch that makes providers productive without being impersonal to their patients. PhysioOutcomes designed pre-built pathways for all MSK conditions that automatically send messages, exercise videos, pain surveys, and reminders to patients based on the standardized treatment protocols. The only thing providers need to do is add a patient to the pathway and sit back. The platform will engage patients on their behalf, track their progress daily, and keep providers in the loop. No manual effort is required!
Deciphering pain and progress
We knew that providers, especially doctors, only need to engage if the patient is in pain and does not report expected progress, typically measured as Patient Reported Outcomes (P.R.O). For various injuries and conditions, the P.R.O surveys, formulas, and standards are entirely different. We wanted to automate it. So, we built a native survey engine to create custom P.R.Os and a formula designer to score patients' conditions from survey responses.
The platform asks patients to regularly take the P.R.O surveys as part of the automated pathways, i.e., reporting their progress or pains. If the patient needs intervention, doctors are automatically informed to engage.
Tracking home exercise compliance
It was crucial for providers to know that patients are "actually" following their routines and exercises regularly and adequately. When they are away, the only way to ensure that is to track patients' interactions. Hence, we implemented complex yet intelligent features that track patients' behavior and interactions. In response, the system can trigger tailored messages, notifications, and surveys to track the recovery progress. We also designed the real-time patient chart that offers a 360 view of their progress and recovery so far.
The Impact
In the first six months, the internet-enhanced home physical therapy platform has helped orthopedic surgeons, physical therapists, and athletic trainers to serve 2000+ patients and facilitated them to recover faster, and we received raving reviews from each patient. PhysioOutcomes is continuously rolling out this platform to clinics and therapists, and we continue to make it into the best connected care platform out there.
Artificial Intelligence – The future of rehab
With PhysioOutcomes’ vision, we continue to push the limits of technology for helping patients and providers. We are integrating automated patient tracking using wearable tech and AI that can track body movement with extreme precision and provide a reliable assessment of the quality of movement and enable us to identify areas of MSK systems that may be weak and vulnerable to injuries for each patient.
We are super excited about the future and the potential that IoT, AI, and connected experiences bring to reimagine rehab!
3,780
Quaternion
Multiplications per
Second4,800
Angles Calculated
per Second9,600
Angular Derivatives
Calculated per Second
Rapidops has enabled our patients to receive their care and stay connected with their providers anywhere and anytime from our outstanding mobile app.
Ready to go!
We strongly believe that PhysioOutcomes has the potential to reshape patient education, physical therapy, and at-home engagement for good in this multi-billion industry. The automated and engaging experiences that the PhysioOutcomes platform enabled, has already helped thousands of patients heal faster with positive behaviors and reduced costs. PhysioOutcomes has also published multiple research papers that demonstrated the power of their approach in engaging patients during recovery. Now it is ready to conquer the world, and together we are constantly pushing the boundaries of MSK care for everyone.