A story from Blue Stone Therapy
She has Parkinson's disease. Every couple of months she comes back onto the caseload, works with her care team, and cycles off again. Part of her copay is paid privately by her family. So each time, the family had to decide whether it was worth it.
Convincing the family was the hard part. Her care team had run plenty of standardized tests with her, and the numbers were real. But numbers are hard for a family to hold onto. Her husband visited and watched her walk. What he did not have was any way to tell whether the therapy was adding up to anything. Without that, it was a hard thing to keep paying for.
So her therapist tried something simpler. She picked a few OneStep measures, built the plan of care around them, and tested the same ones as therapy went on. Every walk became a data point. When her husband came in, there was something to put in front of him. The graph. The numbers. The direction his wife was heading. He could see where she started and where she was two weeks later. He was not being told she was improving. He was watching it happen.
Two weeks in, her husband looked at the graph and told her therapist he could not believe how much she had improved. He had watched her walk plenty of times before. This was the first time he could see the therapy doing something. The graph built rapport, and it built trust, and he bought into what the care team was doing for his wife. She still cycles on and off the caseload every couple of months.
The family stopped wondering whether the therapy was working and watched it work.
“I can't believe she actually improved this much in two weeks' time with you.'”
A patient's family member, shared by Lindsay Oakland PT, Blue Stone Therapy