December - 201919According to Gobezie, adherence to home care programs is a significant problem, with estimates of non-adherence as high as 65 percent, potentially having a detrimental effect on clinical outcomes. The main reason for non-adherence--in cases when employers or insurers are paying for the patients as a part of workers' compensation--is that the patients often lack the knowledge and understanding of the basic health information and services. Gobezie explains, "There are 168 hours in a week, out of which patients attend two therapy sessions for one hour each. The remaining extra hours they are supposed to invest in home therapy programs. However, studies show that home program compliance of the best patients is only 35 percent on average. This low percentage of compliance intensifies the need to create data that really quantifies what a patient is doing. In addition, patients also have no way of knowing if they are performing the movements precisely."PT Genie equips patients with comfortable, three-dimensional, stick-on sensors that are attached to their bodies during their physical therapy protocol. The avatar-guided therapy platform provides patients with the personal direction they need to perform the movements correctly, and the sensors feed data to the system that allows the patient's doctor to review the progress and provide feedback in real time. PT Genie also helps patients through exercise and rehabilitation plans, teaching new exercises, guiding the sessions, and providing real-time instruction and feedback that encourages patients to complete the exercise properly. On the other hand, for healthcare providers, the lack of EMRs in the physical therapy process is a significant challenge. There is no real electronic method of evaluating the quality of a patient's physical therapy experience. PT Genie fills that void. The system acts as an EMR as it provides scalability, portability, accuracy, and electronic data acquisition for all patients. "We can also provide doctors with a comparative analysis of the rehabilitation programs, monitoring patients outside of their visit to compare and quantify their therapy with other doctors' and patients' and, in turn, improve their therapy. We bring this innovation to study human behavior and how it impacts the results," he adds.Elucidating further, Gobezie cites a scenario where he and his team conducted pilot studies with their software and noticed that they were able to increase compliance by 78 percent using PT Genie. With access to real-time feedback, the company was able to cut down the hassles of therapy visits. For or a 12-week protocol--comparing it to people who did not use this platform and adopted traditional therapy--PT Genie was able to reduce the recovery time by about 60 percent.From a financial perspective, patients pay $30 to $40 for each therapy visit. With PT Genie, on the other hand, if a patient signs up for a six-week-long program, six packets with three hydrogel stickers in each of them are delivered. While each package costs $25, the patient can use them for seven days a week, instead of merely two hours during a therapy visit. The cost-savings compared to therapy visits are significant. The length of the program can be customized as per patient needs. The sensors are mailed to the patients' residences along with a clip. Physical therapy companies, healthcare providers, and hospitals as well as insurance companies can subscribe to the software platform for relevant use cases and help their patients register on the platform. Healthcare providers and insurance companies can opt for different levels of software subscription. "There's a software level subscription that allows them to track multiple providers across different offices. This can help them achieve the next level of regional understanding of the field using data related to costs, the number of visits, the patient compliance, and more," informs Gobezie. With PT Genie, insurance companies as well as healthcare systems are benchmarked, whereby they can compare themselves with other competitors, enabling a truly data-driven value-based healthcare.As trends move toward value-based care in orthopedics, PT Genie's efforts to provide greater value to patients is coming to fruition with better outcomes that can be achieved faster and more cost-effectively. Moving ahead, PT Genie has multiple pilot programs in the pipeline. It has a unique value proposition in place and is just a matter of penetrating the market. Currently, the company is finalizing the software and hardware components of its smart physical therapy system and is planning to go big next year, particularly on the software side. "We are amassing a sophisticated scientific advisory board comprised of seasoned orthopedic professionals, who are leaders at big institutions across the country. We're excited about our big play next year," concludes Gobezie. Dr. Reuben Gobezie Co-Founder
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