How to Introduce the PT-Helper App to a Patient

Physical therapy outcomes and patient happiness are very dependent upon the patient’s home exercise compliance. However, it is well recognized that up to 70% of physical therapy patients fail to comply with their home exercise program (HEP).

So, how do you get your patients to do their home exercises?

One approach is to understand how your patients are motivated as Christine Comaford writes in “How To Influence Anyone, Any Time, Anywhere: 4 Subconscious Secrets”.  Are they motivated to achieve goals or motivated to avoid risk and pain? You might want to ask your patients, “What do you want from physical therapy?”

If they respond with “get”, “attain” and “achieve” then these words will help you engage your patient to target goals with their home exercises.

If they respond with “avoid” and “prevent”, you may want to reinforce that you are there to help them avoid pain. A very good friend once told me that she was experiencing shoulder pain and went to see a physical therapist who gave her home exercises. Unfortunately, she didn’t do them as they were not high on her priority list. The next time she went back to therapy, her therapist told her that if she doesn’t do her home exercises, her pain might result in a frozen shoulder. Boy, did that light a fire under her and she did her exercises every day after that.

My therapist, Brad Stotsky at BreakOut Advisors and Rehabilitation , told me, “Once I get a patient on the table, I can tell if they’ve been doing their exercises”.  However, many patients don’t realize this and believe that they can deceive their therapist. Taking a cue from “Human Behavior: How It Changes When Knowingly Being Observed?”,  PT-Helper keeps track of when a patient completes an exercise on the app and provides an Exercise Log for the therapist.

To introduce PT-Helper to his patients, Brad Stotsky will tell his patients on their first visit, 

“We have an app for your smartphone, we don't make any money off of it but we helped create it, it’s $1.99. Our patients find it super helpful to stay on track with their exercises, especially the ones that have holds or many repetitions. Once you download it, we will give you a code that will have your personalized program."

You may want to include that the app was developed for patients, by patients and solves all of the challenges with doing their home exercises.

Once they’ve installed the app, you can then follow up with 

“I’m watching you” 

to tap into their behavior changes under the observation effect for better compliance.

Start your Free 30-Day Trial of PT-Helper CONNECT exercise prescription software and improve your patient’s compliance.