Adapting to Telerehabilitation Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Future is Hybrid

Abstract

Rehabilitation is vital for individuals to build compensatory strategies for, and recover from, physical and cognitive impairments. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted patients from receiving traditional co-located rehabilitation. Thus, a monumental transition occurred requiring Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation (PM&R) clinicians and patients to transition to telerehabilitation. Our interdisciplinary research team of technologists and clinicians performed a case study of PM&R clinicians (physicians, therapists, and psychologists) deploying and transitioning their workflows to telerehabilitation. We found that after clinicians' constant reflection and workflow changes, they successfully adapted most co-located rehabilitation practices to telerehabilitation. Furthermore, because of their adaptation experience, they all alluded that the future workflows of PM&R care involves continuing to leverage telerehabilitation, but within a hybrid rehabilitation model. In this paper, we share the clinicians' reflections on the telerehabilitation transition and then present a conceptual design model aimed to inform the design and development of future telerehabilitation systems that support a hybrid rehabilitation workflow.