Follow-up for physiotherapy and rehab
Rehabilitation is prescribed as a course of eight, ten or twelve sessions, and the outcome depends on finishing it. A patient who stops at session six has paid for half a recovery. They usually stop because they started feeling better, which is the worst possible reason and the most common one.
Feeling better is not being better
Pain resolves before function does. Around the middle of a course the patient can move well enough to get through a normal day, and the remaining sessions start to feel optional.
That is the point at which the clinical case for continuing is strongest and the patient's motivation is weakest, and nothing in a typical clinic is set up to bridge the gap.
Discharge is not the end of the relationship
A patient discharged after a knee replacement, a frozen shoulder or a back injury is a patient at elevated risk of re-injury for a long time afterwards. Nobody contacts them again.
A check-in months later is both good care and a legitimate reason for a new course, and it is one of the easiest recalls in medicine to justify to the patient.
What Insor does for a rehab practice
It notices when a patient misses a session mid-course and reaches out while the course can still be salvaged, rather than after the patient has been absent for a month.
It follows up after discharge on an interval the therapist sets, and flags anything the patient reports that needs looking at.
Questions doctors ask
- How do you know a patient has dropped out mid-course?
- By the gap. A patient attending twice a week who has not been seen in ten days has effectively stopped, whether or not anyone has recorded it. The threshold is set per clinic, because a twice-weekly course and a weekly one fail on very different timescales.
- Is chasing a mid-course patient not just pestering them?
- One contact asking how the recovery is going, from a therapist the patient already knows, is not pestering. It is also frequently the first the clinic hears that the patient stopped because something hurt more, which is clinically useful whether or not they come back.
- Can it handle post-operative rehab schedules?
- Yes. Post-operative protocols are dated from the surgery, which makes them straightforward to hold and prompt. The same applies to the longer-interval re-injury checks that follow discharge, which are the ones most commonly lost.