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Many clinicians, particularly in the UK, still need to work on a ‘virtual first’ basis and limit face to face consultations. Technology can help fill that void, and we want to make sure you are making the most of TrackActive’s features.

If you’re a practitioner and haven’t already used TrackActive’s library of Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs), then we encourage you to give it a try. It is the best way to give you accurate and valid measures of your patient’s progress. We provide a range of PROMs and we have just expanded our library to include the HOOS (Hip disability and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score) and KOOS (Knee injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score). 

These two measures have been a common request and we are planning on adding more over the coming weeks. 

If you are a first time user and are unsure how to access and use TrackActive’s library of PROMs, please read on or listen to our instructional video.
 

1. Open your patient’s program

To use outcome measures you will need to create or open a patient program. We’ve aligned PROMs to your patient’s programs in the same way as the symptom tracking feature. Once you’ve opened a program, click on the ‘PROMs’ button as shown below.

2. Select a PROM questionnaire

You can now select one of the outcome measures from the drop down box. At the bottom of the screen there is also a references section, where you can read more about the outcome measure you intend to use. 

 

3. Complete or send to your patient

Once you’ve selected the outcome measure you want, you can either ‘Complete Now’, or send it to your patient via email by pressing ‘Request Completion’. If you choose to email it they will receive a secure smart link. Once they click it they can easily fill out the questionnaire on their computer or mobile phone.

 

Once your patient has completed it, you will receive an email notification. You can choose to switch these notifications on or off by going to Settings -> Email Settings and selecting the following drop down box.

If you have any questions or would like us to consider adding any specific PROMs, please contact us.

We are reaching out to let you know we are here to support our TrackActive customers during this difficult time. We wanted to give you some tips on how to best use technology to help your business incorporate Telehealth as an alternative to face-to-face consultations.

Moving to video-based consultations is an obvious choice in order to continue helping your patients, and your business. For many, this may feel unusual and you may find it is difficult to justify it as providing the same amount of value and care to your patients. However, we encourage you to embrace this new method of delivering care.

Telehealth has been growing over the years and the justification of its value is shown by numerous research studies demonstrating effectiveness is comparable to face-to-face care. Also it is pleasing to see insurance companies are beginning to cover Telehealth consults. This should be expected considering exercise rehabilitation is the bedrock of musculoskeletal care, with manual therapy losing favour in recent years.

TrackActive is well placed to support your move to Telehealth consultations, and importantly will give your patients more value with, and between, each consultation. Here are some of our tips to making the move to Telehealth:

• Pick a reliable video-based calling software. In our opinion Zoom is a very good option as it allows calendar invites to be sent and for our European customers, reports to be GDPR compliant.
• When creating or editing your patient rehabilitation programmes, use the screen share option. This way you can show patients the edits that you make to them, and you can play the exercise videos directly to your patient on the screen.
• Encourage your patients to use the TrackActive patient app or web login to view programmes, log completed sessions, and report back on progress.
• Add more value in between consultations by replying to patient programme notes. This keeps you connected to them and makes follow-up consultations more productive.
• Send PROMs or alternatively record PROMs through TrackActive while on a call to your patient. Again this adds value and helps you keep a measurable record on their progress. Once you create a patient’s programme, you can send PROMs directly to your patient. Our next development will be to expand our PROMs library. The current library is sufficient to cover lower limb, spine, upper limb and hand rehabilitation. It also includes the Patient Specific Functional Scale which is a highly versatile scale.

We hope you all stay safe and healthy during this very challenging period. From a technology perspective, we will do our best to support you, so please reach out if you have any questions.

We are very excited to announce that we have released our new feature – Patient Reported Outcome Measures! Also known as PROMs, they are a great way to keep track of your patient’s progress with rehabilitation. Some of our subscribers had been testing it out for us ahead of the release. Here is what Heather, a hand therapy clinic owner in Perth has to say –

‘Sent to a patient, who sent it back within 24 hours! Awesome to have access like that…and saving lots of trees as well! Well done!’ 

We’ve made this feature as simple as possible for both you and your patient to get the most out of it. See below for our step-by-step instructions for completing, sending, and viewing patient outcome measures. You can also click to watch our instructional video.
 

1. Open your patient’s programTo use outcome measures you will need to create or open a patient program. We’ve aligned PROMs to your patient’s programs in the same way as the symptom tracking feature. Once you’ve opened a program, click on the ‘PROMs’ button as shown below.

2. Select a PROM questionnaire You can now select one of the outcome measures from the drop down box. At the bottom of the screen there is also a references section, where you can read more about the outcome measure you intend to use. If you need further guidance on which measures to use, click here to read our previous newsletter.

3. Complete or send to your patient

Once you’ve selected the outcome measure you want, you can either ‘Complete Now’, or send it to your patient via email by pressing ‘Request Completion’. If you choose to email it they will receive a secure smart link. Once they click it they can easily fill out the questionnaire on their computer or mobile phone.

Once your patient has completed it, you will receive an email notification. You can choose to switch these notifications on or off by going to Settings -> Email Settings and selecting the following drop down box.

As you can see, using TrackActive Pro for all of your PROMs needs is as easy as 1, 2, 3. If you have any questions, please contact us.

 

Today we are pleased to announce that TrackActive Pro has entered into a collaboration with Gen Re, one of the world’s leading reinsurers, to deliver innovation solutions to their life and health clients in the global insurance market. This is a significant step forward for our company to positively impact the health of large numbers of people, specifically the customers of their direct health and life insurers. To read the full press report, please click here.

Any questions or enquiries regarding the agreement should be directed to the contact details outlined in the press report.

Article written by Ebele Mogo, Doctor of Public Health, Community and Behavioural Health.

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Artificial intelligence, the science of engineering high-level computational abilities, is rising to the fore of our conversations on big data. Discussions on artificial intelligence span from optimistic accounts of how robots will make our lives easier, to fears about what this will mean for our jobs and data privacy. Either way, artificial intelligence is no longer for futuristic movie scripts alone. It is now a growing reality.

Health is not left behind in this conversation. You may have heard of Google’s Deep Mind Project that started a collaboration with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS). By analyzing the large database of the NHS, Deep Mind intends to support clinicians to improve treatment plans. Machine learning algorithms have been to used to improve the life of at-risk children through more timely monitoring. Ambitious projects like Google Brain aim to predict medical events that will happen to you in the future.

What does artificial intelligence mean for the future of healthcare?

First, let us review the current health challenges of our day. The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3 is to “ensure healthy lives and promote wellbeing for all at all ages”, with priorities like infectious diseases and maternal mortality as well as the growing problem of non-communicable disease deaths including injury and pollution-related diseases. Health systems are changing their payment models to reflect a focus away from services rendered to real value in the form of behavioural health change and improved health outcomes. There is also a stronger focus on inclusiveness as you may have seen reflected in SDG 3 with its repetitive use of the word “all”. We need to ensure that health benefits accrue to all and throughout their lifecourse.

Let’s take a look at a few ways that artificial intelligence could support these goals.

Personalized medicine

Artificial intelligence will have the unique ability to quickly integrate data from the evidence with various aspects of patients’ lives – their genes, their lifestyle, their medical history. This information could be used to create evidence-based treatment options for the patient at a very high level of precision. With the still significant problem of infectious diseases and maternal and infant deaths, the ability of artificial intelligence to monitor patients in real time, integrating this information with their histories and the evidence can support clinical decision making.

Informing prevention and behaviour change

The value proposition for artificial intelligence is not limited to treatment. With a growing focus on prevention as non-communicable disease rates rise around the world, artificial intelligence could be deployed to engage patients in healthier behaviours outside the clinic to ensure they improve their behaviours and hence their outcomes. This could yield a much needed reduction in healthcare costs.

Improving population health

Issues of equity are integral to improving population health as we see reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals. Equity needs to be informed with the evidence. Artificial intelligence can be used to feed and mine data records, aggregating this information at a high level and informing plans to improve aspects of the places where people live, work and play, for better health and access to care. In India, such high level analytics are already being used to inform responses to pollution.

Conclusion

As the new and complex field it is, there are various moving parts that will need to be addressed. You can imagine that one is privacy – making sure that patient records are safely mined and stored. Another is data quality. For a field that relies heavily on data, the right data infrastructure are necessary as a foundation for intelligent computation.This includes the need to break down data silos so that various sources of data about a patient’s life can be securely and quickly integrated. Each aspect of the moving target – policy around big data, data privacy, data integration, precision medicine – will need to be optimized, measured and improved. However, if early indications are anything to go by, artificial intelligence will take on ever more complex public health decisions, hopefully saving lives and money.

Penny, a 40 year old graphic designer had been seeing her physiotherapist on and off for low back pain for 3 years. Things were still pretty up and down. She’d been consistent with her strengthening and mobility exercises making sure she put aside 15 minutes every day to get that done. She had also made sure her workstation was set up well and she took frequent breaks to walk around and move. But she could never fully shift the pain in her back and she’d started to accept that maybe it would never go.