Injuries are tough. For student athletes, it can mean missed seasons, time spent on the bench, a distraction from classes, and sometimes...extra semesters to make up for it. And for the average adult, an injury can cause serious disruptions to everyday life, like less time playing with the kids, having to take off work, reduced mobility, and even loss of independence.

Though for many patients, injury rehabilitation can be as much an obstacle as the injury itself.

Certainly, navigating the web of providers and care settings can be a daunting and difficult task. For student athletes, this may mean coordinating care between doctors, physical therapists, athletic trainers, or some combination thereof. Similarly, injury rehabilitation for the average patient will likely involve coordinating care between some combination of doctors, physical therapists, chiropractors, or potentially even a home health care provider, depending on the severity of the injury.

In each of these cases, the sheer number of appointments, providers, and coordination that must occur can leave many patients feeling disillusioned, confused, and “out on their own” -- left to navigate this intricate web and direct their recovery themselves. What’s more, the siloed nature of this landscape leaves many opportunities for patients to “fall through the cracks” on their road to recovery. For more minor injuries, this intimidating landscape might be enough to convince patients that their injury rehabilitation can wait.

Lack of Communication & Care Coordination in Injury Rehabilitation

Although the severity of the injury, the patient's circumstances, and the combination of providers needed to treat the injury are unique to each case, a commonality between any injury rehabilitation situation is that the patient serves as the vector of coordination between all points or providers. Patients are oftentimes physically carrying documents, forms, and their own PHI (protected health information) from one provider’s office to another. Certainly, this system is neither efficient nor free from error. The lack of communication and coordination in this setting makes both patient and providers' lives more difficult.

pMD’s Patient Communication Software Provides Solutions

Here at pMD, our mission is to improve patient lives, and in the process, make doctors’ lives easier. pMD’s secure messaging solution was born out of a need for providers within a practice to be able to communicate with each other. But over the past 5 years, we’ve expanded the platform, to allow providers to communicate with other providers outside of their practice, as well as with patients directly. Just recently, we introduced group messaging to our platform, allowing for an even higher degree of coordination between patients, providers, and caretakers.  

In the case of injury rehabilitation, pMD’s secure messaging platform gives patients the opportunity to communicate and coordinate directly with their providers, ask follow-up questions related to their rehab plans, and send and receive documents from their providers. Providers, in turn, are able to control conversations with patients, share secure documents, communicate about PHI freely, and coordinate with other providers, all while keeping their personal contact information private.

In today’s ever-complicated health care landscape, communication and coordination are key to a quick recovery. pMD’s communication software serves as an elegant solution to many of the nuanced problems associated with injury rehabilitation and care coordination that currently plague this environment. In the process of improving system efficiencies within and between practices, we hope to make patients' lives better, so they can have that time back with their kids, get back on the field, or get back to work. Because that’s what really matters!

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