Essen Health Care, a medical group in New York City, has a Center of Excellence for Pain with physical therapy, pain specialists, neurology and orthopedic specialists. It serves patients with acute and chronic issues in need of physical therapy.
In addition, it serves many elderly house call patients, due to pandemic restrictions, who have functionally deteriorated due to a lack of physical activity.
THE PROBLEM
Continuity and access to care for patients living with chronic diseases or going through cardiac and orthopedic rehabilitation are one of the most challenging areas in healthcare.
Difficulties include ensuring the quality of recovery, reducing readmission, increasing accessibility to therapy and increasing compliance with personalized treatment. This reduces the excessive costs involved for both the patient and the health system.
“As our offices have opened post-pandemic for full on-site care, there is a varying level of patient compliance to come in for on-site care,” said Dr. Sumir Sahgal, founder and chief medical officer. “The concern includes potential exposure to COVID, cost of transportation and other priorities in a post-COVID era.
“We faced our own issues when it came to staffing shortages due to call outs from COVID exposure,” he continued. “Post-exposure or with COVID, regardless of feeling well and able to work, physical therapists couldn’t come to work since they posed a great risk to others. In addition, we had difficulty recruiting due to a small pool of available trained therapists.”
PROPOSAL
Faced with these challenges, Essen Health Care turned to health IT vendor WizeCare’s enterprise-wide virtual rehabilitation and remote monitoring technology.
WizeCare has developed technology for virtual physical therapy synchronized as well as unsynchronized with clinician time. It is powered by artificial intelligence, big data collection and analysis, computer vision, and machine learning.
“Our team spent a lot of time training but also guiding the patients. Even with clear goals, it took time and effort to get buy-in from all staff and clinicians.”
Dr. Sumir Sahgal, Essen Health Care
