Patients Prefer Video Instruction

Can your patients be more grateful for your care? You betcha!

We patients are pretty simple folk. We have only one request: to feel better.

Our time in the clinic with you is progress. You relieve our pain through your hands-on manipulations as well as give us support and encouragement. Yet, we spend most of our time at home alone without your guidance, without your voice to remind us what to do and without your belief in our recovery.

The easiest way to ease our anxiety between appointments is to give us a little bit of you to take home — in bite-sized videos.

Video has changed every part of our lives. Want to learn a new skill? Simply login to YouTube and you can learn how to do practically anything. Watching a recording of someone showing you how to do it not only helps you learn more quickly, but also lets you watch it as many times as you need to figure it out.

No surprise then that patients choose video over paper 92% of the time in outpatient rehab clinics.

Do your patients have the choice? Can they get video recordings of you reminding them how to do their home exercises?

Want more gratitude for your care?

Give videos to your patients with AC Health and brace yourself for the bucket of thanks they pour over your head the next time they come into the clinic.

How to Delight Us:

DO:

  1. If possible, hand the phone or tablet over to your patient to take the video of you demonstrating the exercise. This way you won’t be correcting our mistakes during the recording. It’s better for you to model and describe the proper form.
  2. Talk to us using our name while demonstrating the exercise. When you record it, that will lead you to be more personal about our physical tendencies — like keeping our chin raised. When we watch it, it will feel more personal to us.  we will believe that you are designing the exercise just for us.
  3. Be in a well-lit space. Best to be in a brightly lit room, and if some of that light is coming from windows, put the windows behind the camera, not in front of it.

DON’T:

  1. Speak too fast. Visualize our getting into position and making adjustments before you start to perform the exercise. That way we can turn on the video and know that we have a few seconds to get into position correctly before starting the exercise.
  2. Mention sets and reps and frequency etc during the recording. As we progress through our recovery, you may add sets perhaps and it will confuse us to hear your mentioning the number during the recording. All of that information — a description of the exercise and the specifics of our performing the exercise until the next appointment — should be available on the screen below the exercise.
  3. [Optional depending on your patient’s need] Demonstrate the exercise with more than 2 or 3 repetitions. We want to be reminded how to properly do the exercise but we don’t need you to do each set with us, as personal trainers do.

Remember that once you use a simple app like AC Health to prescribe exercises, you will have your patient’s attention on their phone. Think about other short videos that you can add to their private care plan, like selfie encouragement videos or stress relief practices.

The bottom line is that we patients trust you to “fix” us and your presence in our day is a reminder that we are being taken care of by a therapist who truly cares about our recovery.