What is it about?
Less resource intensive alternatives to home visits for post-surgical rehabilitation following orthopedic surgeries are important, given the increasing need for home care services and shortage of health resources. In our study, we demonstrated that there are no significant differences between telerehabilitation and face-to-face home visit rehabilitation with respect to improvement in clinical and functional outcome scores following total knee arthroplasty. In-home telerehabilitation is an effective alternative to face-to-face service delivery and may be a suitable method of delivering physiotherapy following total knee arthroplasty.
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Why is it important?
Our work is the first to provide strong evidence for the efficacy of telerehabilitation for TKA patients after hospital discharge. It supports the use of telerehabilitation as an alternative to conventional face-to-face service delivery. This is important information for surgeons, clinicians and clinic managers who are interested in incorporating this type of innovative service into their practice.
Perspectives
Our findings clearly support the safety of teletreatments when provided in a structured manner and under the responsibility of health professionals. Indeed, a comparable low rate of adverse events was found in both groups and there were no adverse events related to therapy in the telerehabilitation group. In addition, we found that at-distance intervention (telerehabilitation) was not only relevant in rural regions, but also in urban and metropolitan areas, where traffic is dense and where there are various issues related to transportation (i.e. parking). Cost-saving associated to telerehabilitation was published in a companion paper (Tousignant, Moffet, Nadeau et al. JMIR 2015, Vol 17 (3): e83). Our results are encouraging for health professionals, administrators, health policy decision-makers who may want to implement such alternatives to service delivery.
Professor Helene Moffet
Universite Laval
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: In-Home Telerehabilitation Compared with Face-to-Face Rehabilitation After Total Knee Arthroplasty, Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, July 2015, The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, Inc.,
DOI: 10.2106/jbjs.n.01066.
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