Personalize Patient Care: Pediatrics Edition
Physical and occupational therapists specializing in pediatrics are faced with a constant challenge: adapting complex rehabilitation techniques developed by adults to a patient population that thinks and acts very differently from grown-ups. This need for adaptation can make providing comprehensive home programs particularly difficult – let’s look at how AC Health can help.
Design Fun, Engaging Exercises
The exercises, activities, and intervention strategies you use with pediatric patients are unique: they must be tailored to appeal to a child’s sense of play and shorter attention span. Traditional home program apps and builders don’t feature the types of games or task-focused activities that you employ to engage your patients.
The AC Health app solves this problem by allowing you to record real-time audio and video of each therapeutic activity as you are performing it with your patient. You no longer have to write out complicated instructions on paper that your patient’s family is likely to lose.
Help Caregivers Help Their Children
The parents and caregivers of pediatric patients play a key role in their child’s participation in therapy, and therapists must therefore consider how to best educate caregivers in proper home program performance.
Ideally, adult caregivers should be empowered to act as “co-therapists”, assisting children with therapeutic activities in the home between visits with their therapist. Parents commonly cite a lack of time and energy as a reason for poor home program adherence, so pediatric therapists are tasked with the challenge of making home programs as simple and user-friendly as possible.
The AC Health app securely stores the photos and videos of each activity you assign to your patients and their families. Caregivers can quickly access these recordings in the app to easily refresh their memories on how to perform the techniques at home.
Additionally, the goal setting section of the app allows you to assign multiple individualized treatment goals to each patient. Setting patient- and family-centered goals is key to the success of pediatric rehabilitation, and AC Health helps you and your patients track progress on these goals throughout the episode of care.