As a founder and CTO I’ve always cringed when our software has been labelled as an ‘exercise prescription tool’, it just doesn’t feel like it describes the opportunities Rehab Guru offers. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve seen many of our users completely reimagine now they deliver care, leveraging Rehab Guru’s features to assess, prescribe, monitor, follow-up and use data to inform their clinical decisions.
I’ve always cringed when our software has been labelled as an ‘exercise prescription tool’, it just doesn’t feel like it describes the opportunities Rehab Guru offers
Hearing such user stories of successful business transformation through the use of Rehab Guru, motivates us to expand our services and lead from the front. We’re so excited to release these new features and see them being used to improve your business and patient care. We approach all our feature development by being as un-opinionated as possible, which means that we see a problem and keep stepping backwards from it until we find the sweet spot between ensuring it packs the biggest punch without forcing our users to adopt a rigid workflow.
Building ‘Forms’ (which power both our treatment notes and custom forms is the perfect example of this approach. Rather than building an array of static forms for you, we stepped back to see how we could offer infinite possibilities through the creation of a generic form builder.
Forms are not really a ‘feature’, but rather an enabler. They are the building blocks for both Treatment Notes and Patient Forms. The form builder can be used for the creation of a questionnaire, a crib sheet prompting a thorough subjective examination or a prompt sheet for SOAP notes, surveys etc (the list is really endless Treatment Notes and Patient Forms 👇). The forms use a number of different web form input types including:
Our flexible form builder is where you build the templates for use as treatment notes or sendable patient form (I.e. PROMs). A form can be built for any use case you can imagine, for example SOAP notes, surveys, outcome measures, screening, triage and intake questionnaires can all be built exactly how you want them.
The development and inclusion of the treatment notes capability was born out of the raw ingredients we already had. We have a form builder, a nice user interface, a client record, a means of entering and storing data security, it was really a small step to offer treatment notes, so we did!
This may make it sound like notes were an afterthought, which they weren’t. We had several feature requests for treatment notes, however we always thought that problem was somewhat solved through offering a wide array of integration to patient management systems. However, the more users we spoke to, the more we found that an all in one, end-to-end solution for the intake, assessment, exercise prescription, management, engagement and follow-up was missing.
Central to this end-to-end workflow is the client/patient. The Majority of Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Patient Management Systems (PMS) are not tightly linked and revolve around with the Client, they revolve around the User (the clinician). This linkage (between software and client) has been integral to Rehab Guru’s functionality for a long time and has become quite refined. Clients use of our iOS and Android Apps to engage with their programme, attend Telehealth appointments, track their progress and a provide data-rich picture of their progress has aided clinical decision making, research and has shown to significantly improve PROM and PREMs.
What drives us is customer satisfaction and fulfilling our customer’s needs, not looking over the fence and trying to be something we're not!
You may ask, “So does Rehab Guru fancy itself as the next [insert leading PMS 😀]” and the answer is No, we don’t. There are some excellent solutions available, led by great founders who have built software to solve complex issues for their users. We will be the first to advise our customers to use one of our partners if it solves their requirements. What drives us is customer satisfaction and fulfilling our customer’s needs, not looking over the fence and trying to be something we're not!
So that’s the background, what do they look like and what you can do with them. Firstly, forms, in-keeping with our User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) are intuitive to use and you’re only limited by your imagination when creating notes templates.
The ability to send forms fits directly with our desire to elongate the care pathway and improve patient management pre and post appointment. In our telehealth announcement post I said:
“Rehab Guru has delivered a well-polished exercise prescription workflow over the last two years. However, until now it lacked the pre-appointment and remote-appointment aspects."
… and Patient Forms takes this further, by providing you with the ability to create bespoke branded forms, send them directly to patients and save their response directly onto the patient’s record.
We cannot wait to see what you create with the form builder and patient forms, it offers huge opportunities for data collection, streamlined workflows, an improved patient experiences while allowing clinics to further reimagine their business model just as we have seen with the widespread adoption of Telehealth.
We released the first version of Telehealth in March 20 just before the world saw the disruption of the COVID-19 lockdown. In our April blog post Choosing a Service to Host your On-Line Consultations I discussed a number of challenges in delivering a compatible, secure and flexible Telehealth service. Part of that discussion was highlighting our ability to build upon solid foundations and choose alternative services, if in the future we choose to, well now is that time.
We are pleased to offer Telehealth+ an additional Telehealth service which offers the following benefits over our standard Telehealth service:
Telehealth+ is being offered in addition to our standard Telehealth service (now called Telehealth Lite) and its features are also getting a boost, with the ability to book appointments and send appointment details via email.
We are offering two services as part of our commitment to balancing price, features and security. Our new Telehealth+ service utilises a world leading communication provider called Twilio. We have chosen Twilio based on a number of factors, not least their security and privacy commitments and assurances.
Telehealth+ is not a wholly included service in your Rehab Guru subscription, depending on the number of users in your team will determine how many inclusive Telehealth+ client minutes you receive. Telehealth+ usage is metered using a Credit based system to account for the number of Client Minutes you use (for example 2 people on a call for 30 minutes will use a total of 60 client minutes). We have chosen to use a credit-based system as this same credit account will be used for SMS and WhatsApp messaging when we finish their development.
The process of innovating, developing, testing and finally releasing features takes time, and while these features are only just being released, we are already moving our ‘next big thing’ into the testing stage. I write this privy to the knowledge of what is due for release in the next few months, and while we’re a pretty modest team we have to say we’ve got some pretty awesome things to come. Our latest news will always be announced on Twitter and via our Changelog. Please PM on social media us or reach out to us via support at support.rehabguru.com if you have any questions.
A former Exercise Rehabilitation Instructor (ERI) in the Royal Air Force (RAF). He went on to compete for Great Britain in Modern Pentathlon. He is now an RAF Training Officer. As the CTO he leads the engineering team at Rehab Guru.
