IncludeHealth, a digital musculoskeletal company, has teamed up with Yale New Haven Health System to expand care for patients with MSK conditions.
The partnership will facilitate a hybrid care model, leveraging IncludeHealth’s platform to deliver virtual physical therapy in patients’ homes. The platform, called MSK-OS, is cloud-based, device-agnostic and harnesses body-tracking tech with clinical intelligence and tools for virtual MSK care delivery. IncludeHealth works with providers as a software-as-a-service; it is provided at no cost to the patient.
The hybrid model is a first in the industry, the parties say, and will be relevant to many patient populations, including those undergoing surgery, suffering from chronic pain or receiving outpatient physical therapy. The idea is to preserve a patient’s trusted clinical team and their decision-making power over a treatment plan. The partnership kicked off earlier this year at Yale New Haven Hospital, with the potential to scale across the health system in the future.
IncludeHealth’s goal is to enable care beyond the traditional four walls of an in-person setting. Clinicians “are not used to thinking about treating that patient both while they’re face to face with them and then afterward,” IncludeHealth CEO Ryan Eder told Fierce Healthcare. The company’s biggest task, he added, is helping clinicians think about that and maintaining a seamless workflow integration.
Clinicians can send a digital plan to patients through IncludeHealth, which they can open on any device. The platform then delivers an interactive home exercise plan and tracks in real-time a patient’s performance, like their range of motion. Patient progress can be monitored remotely and care plans adjusted as needed.
This approach results in better engagement between clinicians and patients, Eder noted. IncludeHealth has seen 80% engagement rates so far, with the average patient doing 20 sessions a month on top of their onsite visits.
IncludeHealth built out its platform in collaboration with Google and other clinical partners. Over the past two years, the tech has been deployed in a variety of settings with physical therapy, orthopedics and health system partners. It is also compatible with different payment models, according to Eder.
YNHHS is a leader in progressive thinking on the evolution of care delivery, Eder said, and the health system is interested in how tech “can really expand the way that we can connect with the patient.”