“Better use of data and technology has the power to improve health, transforming the quality and reducing the cost of health and care services.” – Department of Health & Social Care, 2014

Fluid Motion is a community healthcare service. It delivers group aquatic rehabilitation sessions in local swimming pools for the treatment, management and prevention of musculoskeletal conditions.

Fluid Motion assesses each individual participant, identifying their specific needs to generate a tailored rehabilitation plan based on existing research and best clinical practice. This distinguishes them from most other health management programmes.

The problem

Musculoskeletal conditions make up around 2 to 3 out of every 5 GP appointments and accounts for the majority of all long-term sick leave in the UK. Sufferers from these conditions require tailored rehabilitation plans, but historically these have been expensive and time-consuming to create.

Each patient’s rehabilitation plan is developed in a manual, repetitive and protracted process by a qualified physiotherapist or osteopath, who are an expensive resource. Once completed, the plans are provided to lower-cost fitness instructors, who deliver the practical sessions.

But by using Rainbird to model the expertise of physiotherapists and osteopaths, fitness instructors could generate high-quality tailored plans for their patients.

Having a Rainbird solution accessible via a tablet device would also give patients the power to select and tailor their own programme, increasing the number of patients that Fluid Motion could support, while significantly differentiating their service offering.

The solution

Rainbird’s team worked with Fluid Motion’s qualified physiotherapists and osteopaths to encode their model of patient treatment in extended knowledge graphs, including the suitability of numerous exercises to individual patient symptoms. The resulting models were then integrated into a mobile front-end that could be accessed by Fluid Motion’s network of fitness instructors. The tool allows them to create a tailored, illustrated rehabilitation plan for patients as a result of an interaction with a virtual physiotherapist or osteopath.

The result was a solution that:

• improves the customer journey by eliminating handovers between medical staff and the fitness instructor prior to patient sessions taking place, and at each review. This enables plans to be more iterative in response to patient progress.
• lowers staff costs and increases throughput by automatically generating rehabilitation plans.
• Generates consistently high-quality plans based on the physiotherapists and osteopaths’ expertise modelled in Rainbird.

The next step is for Fluid Motion to provide access to patients directly so they can create their own rehabilitation plans. Patients will have the facility to provide feedback so that Rainbird can adapt their plan, making alternative recommendations if specific exercises are uncomfortable.