Why Would Creating Exercise Programs be Key as a Practitioner?

About Joris:

Joris has been working with people his whole life. It started in sports education, where he studied to become a tennis coach, after which he decided to study physiotherapy. "I like working with people, and I also liked the idea of challenging myself a bit more". Two years later, after an additional master's in manual therapy, he was asked to become co-owner of the practice together with his colleague Peter Eemers. Since then, the practice has grown to 20 colleagues in 5 locations, and soon they will open a new branch that will focus entirely on prevention.

"We have a very active practice that focuses very much on activating people. We believe that our profession will focus more on a healthy lifestyle in the future. To get people fit, make people aware of exercising, and that we will help with that as physical therapists."

Whilst developing the physio fitness offerings in 2004, Joris was already interested in using digital tools: "I wanted to encourage people to be engaged in their movement daily, rather than just a half-hour therapy session during the week or the one-hour fitness." The team began with a simple program, but soon Joris wanted to move on to a more advanced program to meet the needs of both practitioner and patient. Joris decided to try Physitrack in 2017 and is immensely pleased with his choice to this day. 90% of all patients treated have a Physitrack program, where Joris coaches them to achieve their goals. "The sophisticated program connects very much with the practice, adding tremendous value for therapists and patients."
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Helpful tips for practitioners:

• Create your own exercise programs and possibly save them under your own name to find them quickly in the library: "Spend one or two hours to look at patients and conditions that you see a lot and make some programs based on that. It doesn't have to be complicated at all; it's easy to choose the exercises, so you have a program set up in no time. Yes, it is a time investment, but it has saved me a lot of time and energy in the end," says Joris. "When assigning a patient, sometimes I only have to make a few changes, and sometimes nothing at all. You then have a program ready within a minute, and that's what I find incredibly powerful about Physitrack."

• Put together a program during a treatment session. Because it takes little time, it makes it possible for Joris to put a program together with his patient during a treatment session. Joris sees it as a tremendous service to the patient to offer such a tool where information and exercises are accessible on the patient's cell phone. By setting up the treatment together with the patient in Physitrack, patients can already become visually acquainted with the exercises and become an active participant of their own rehabilitation. "Time outside of treatment is limited, so that's also the strength of Physitrack for me, that you can use it socially during treatment."
  

Practical tips for practice owners:

In addition to the tips on investing time in your exercise programs and co-designing a program with the patient during treatment, Joris also has a tip for fellow practice owners. "Embrace Physitrack from the start and make it an integral part of your treatment. It is not easy to implement a new product; therapists already have a lot to do. To implement something new, you have to spend time and attention on this before it runs smoothly." Joris recommends scheduling practical meetings with the team with an approach of "we're going to look at it together, discuss with it together and share experiences. "It's not perfect at first, and you may have some resistance. But Physitrack is practical to use: therapist and patient-friendly; and super easy to use on everyone's cell phone!" says Joris.

"You make patients more satisfied, and if people are more satisfied, it leads to more clients. It's as simple as that."

Thanks, Joris, for your tips!

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Need a reminder of how to create an exercise program? Click here.

Do you want to share your story with us? Reach out to Anna at ar@physitrack.com - we'd love to hear from you!