Home exercise programmes in PhysioDesk: from your library to the patient's phone
Every clinic starts with a ready exercise library. Prescribe in a few taps, and the patient carries the programme home on their phone instead of on a sheet of paper.
Most of a patient's recovery happens between sessions, at home. Paper exercise sheets get lost, folded into a drawer, or misread. In PhysioDesk the home programme lives on the patient's phone, written exactly as you prescribed it.
A library from day one
Every clinic starts with the standard PhysioDesk exercise library already installed. It is grouped by body part (ankle, knee, hip, spine, shoulder, neck and more), shown as cards with anatomy illustrations, and written in plain words a patient can follow. The library describes how to do each exercise; it never claims what an exercise will cure.
The library is your clinic's own. The owner can add exercises, edit the wording, and remove what the clinic does not use. Therapists prescribe from it.
Prescribing
From a patient's record, choose exercises by typing to search, and set for each:
sets
repetitions
hold, in seconds
frequency, such as twice a day
Prescribing takes a few taps, and the same wording is used every time, so two therapists never describe one exercise two different ways.
When an exercise is no longer needed, stop it. It stays on the record, so you can always see what has been tried.
What the patient sees
The patient's home programme appears in the patient portal under My exercises, with each exercise's dose exactly as you set it. In the PhysioDesk app, launching soon on Android and iPhone, patients can tick each exercise off as they do it, so you can see at the next session whether the programme is being followed.
Patients sign in with the mobile number you have for them, so there is nothing for your clinic to hand out.
Writing a programme patients follow
A few habits make home programmes work:
Prescribe three to five exercises, not twelve.
Give every exercise a number for each part of the dose.
Show each one in the clinic and watch the patient do it once.
Ask at the next visit how many days they did it, not whether they did.
We wrote more about this in writing an exercise prescription patients actually follow.
Measure whether it is working
Pair the programme with progress measures, such as pain score, range of motion or walking distance, recorded on a date. PhysioDesk charts them over the course of treatment, so you and the patient can see whether the programme is doing its job.
Try it
Prescribe a programme and open it as the patient in the 30-minute demo on the pricing page.
Free to start, and no card to begin with.
Open an account and use it with real patients. Move up only when the clinic has outgrown what the free tier holds.