United Healthcare’s New Physical Therapy App

United Healthcare and Kaia Health have partnered to create a virtual program that provides 24/7 feedback and access to tools. Here’s what that means for patients of physical therapy.

While this will be exceedingly useful for those who have musculoskeletal conditions and those post-op, patients should be careful now to use it as a replacement for in-person physical therapy. This program shouldn’t act as a replacement for in-person physical therapy as recovery is still contingent upon professionally guided hands-on manual physical therapy. However, virtual physical therapy sessions open access to help for those who:

• Have limited access to treatment due to location
• Have financial-limitations that inhibit access to physical therapy
• Have limited flexibility with their scheduling

When paired with in-person physical therapy, this new program has the potential to provide results for those managing conditions or recovering from surgery. You should always speak with your physical therapists before attempting to manage your recovery through an app or virtual service.

Video transcript

United Health Care and Kaia Health Care Solutions have teamed up to come up with a physical therapy app that will focus on their patients that are typically sounds like post-op. It will give you a wonderful option to perform any of the exercises that you do at home. It sounds like it’s going to be a free service or a 24/7 service that you can access at any point in the day. This is great for patients that may have a post-op procedure that is fairly commonplace, such as a total knee replacement or a total hip replacement. Things that you can do at home, such as exercises ourselves, stretching will be accessible. It sounds like this app that’s great for any of our patients or any United Health Care members that are looking for solutions for in-home. When it comes to the more diagnostic or more difficult cases when it comes to physical therapy, where more cases that are musculoskeletal in nature or maybe even ligamentous or anything along those lines, you’re going to still be directed towards in-person physical therapy. And that’s where we will come in. We’ll continue to be the specialists in movement and the specialists in the ability to diagnose musculoskeletal disorders that can’t be treated strictly with just exercise. And time will time continues to show that exercise and manual techniques put together typically form the best results when it comes to musculoskeletal disorders. Here at our office, we continue to focus on the importance of differential diagnosis. Hands-On Manual Therapy and combined with therapeutic activities such as exercise, balance, neuromuscular reeducation, postural awareness, muscle energy, techniques, those are all things that still will require the skilled physical therapy or skilled technicians such as ourselves here at The Physical Therapy Effect.