iPad envy? You know you want one…for the office!

Posted on September 25, 2012 by bendehan

I just got a new iPad 3, and even convinced my wife to buy one for her PT office. You may have noticed that we have an iPad giveaway contest on Therapydia, so you may have guessed that I am a fan. While the iPad 3 is not really that different from the iPad 2, the PT-related apps are getting better and the video capability, coupled with the higher resolution display, is a really great feature for PTs who want to work video into their treatment programs.

Since I am spending so much time trying to understand trends in the Physical Therapy market, it is interesting to look at the iPad from the perspective of a PT, or any other wellness professional, who has held off on buying one for office use. I think four things really stand out:

1) After a slow start, there are now a lot of apps for PTs: 64 for the iPad and 89 for the iPhone. 27 of the iPad apps are free with the rest ranging from $1 to $80. Also, many useful apps like Pocket Body exist in the broader “Health and Fitness” category. As a patient, I would much rather a PT walk me through the 3D layered images on Pocket Body than show me a poster on the wall. I remember looking at iPad apps for PT two years ago, and loading some of those on my old iPad. There wasn’t much to choose from, and the apps were marginally functional. Now, it would be a serious challenge to review all of the useful apps. Luckily, I think the community does a pretty good job of that. You can sort under relevance by “most popular” and “customer rating” to see what others are using/buying.

2) Other advanced apps for managing your personal and professional lives are taking off, and the higher volume means they are getting REALLY good. If you haven’t heard of Dropbox, and you don’t know what the “Cloud” is, it will all come together when Apple bombards you with iCloud marketing in the upcoming months. It will be very seductive; “Own an iPhone, an iPad, AND an iMac/MacBook! Store files ‘in-the-cloud’ and share them across all your devices whenever you need them.” OK for Mac super users, but for those of you who have other non-Apple devices, and for better sharing features, I highly recommend Dropbox. just bought 100 GB of storage with Dropbox for $10/month! I can remember what XDrive charged for 1 MB back in 1999, and what Akamai charged to host website photos in 2005 so this feels like quite the bargain, no?

3) Video! PT is an industry made for video! It is crazy how easy it is to take a great video on the iPad and display it immediately to someone (say, a patient like me), and email it to someone (say, a patient like me). It’s even easier to store videos, and add videos to your personal video library accessible from almost anywhere. I wonder if video will do for wellness blogging what photos did for food blogging? The food blogging environment changed drastically when cheap digital cameras and enough bandwidth to store the photos for free came together in 2007.

4) Voice interface. On the new iPad keyboard, you will see a little microphone icon right next to the space bar on the keypad. If you put the cursor in almost any application requiring text input and then hit the microphone button, you can dictate text. For professions where your hands are occupied and you want to take notes, this is pretty cool. I don’t know if this is going to transform the way PTs take down their notes, but I do think that PTs are pretty good candidates to be early adopters of this feature. Like most new technology, speech to text functionality takes a little getting used to. If you are like me, you will spend the first few sessions with this feature wondering how anyone can understand what you are saying in the first place, and considering diction lessons. And ultimately, contemplating the future of voice interface, worrying when you or someone you know is going to end a sentence with “Period, Paragraph”

Not convinced? Here are some iPad-related numbers as Apple eyes a $1 Trillion market cap (today, it is the most valuable US company with a market cap of $700 Billion).

Tablets will pass personal computers in units sold per year by 2015:

Already over 84M iPads sold in just two years; a faster uptake rate than either iPods or iPhones.

2 Million iPhone 5 pre-orders on launch day September 21, 2012.

Which all amounts to enormous peer pressure to buy one or all of these devices. So, feel fortunate if you have a legitimate professional reason to buy one!

The Big Boom Theory

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Alex Scioli

We recently sat down with one of our Advisors, Steve Thompson, and asked him some tough questions about the PT profession. We’ve already told you why we think it’s a great time to be a PT, now Steve shares his take on PTs explosive growth (the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that PT will grow 39% from 2010 to 2020!).

Age Is Just a Number

I believe PT is growing for several reasons. First, the baby boomer generation is aging and reaching Medicare eligible ages and as they age, they will need more support and help to maintain lifestyles to which they are accustomed. Also, the population has aged, the number of joint replacements being performed is increasing as well and those patients need skilled therapy to recover from this complex surgery. The idea of senior citizens is transforming as well. Many of our “senior citizens” are becoming “athletic seniors”. As this population ages and wants to keep an active lifestyle, physical therapy stands to be a front-runner in helping keep this population active. Physical therapists are the best-trained healthcare professionals to assess and treat movement impairments. As we age, we will most likely develop more and more movement impairments and therefore, PT will be needed and the growth in the profession will be justified.

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Therapydia Staff: My PT Story

Posted on September 6, 2012 by Maren Bannon

In “My PT Story” posts, members of our staff share how their lives and the lives of those close to them have been impacted by physical therapy. Our goal is to further communicate PT’s value to other healthcare providers, patients, friends, and family to help raise awareness and elevate the profession. We believe you don’t have to be a PT to Promote PT!

When I started working at Therapydia, I thought I knew the value of Physical Therapy. Back in high school I suffered a nagging rotator cuff injury and eventual surgery that forced me to miss my junior year on the state tennis tournament circuit. At the time, my only dream in life was to become a college tennis player, and now I was missing the most important recruiting season. Obviously, I thought my life was over. But over the months I spent in rehabilitation I gained a great deal of respect for my physical therapists. Plus my visits were brightened by that cute PT assistant – he dutifully kept me company during my ten minutes on the “shoulder bike” and was such a big step above all the boys in my high school.

But I didn’t truly realize the value of therapy until much more recently. My husband and I have become friends with an older woman in our neighborhood named Barbara, who unfortunately is homebound due to suffering a stroke. When we first met her, she could barely even walk around her apartment without a cane, much less make the long trip to her front door and down the stairs to the street. So she spent her days alone in her tiny apartment. Sometimes when we would visit we would take her for a walk in her wheelchair and she would confess that she hadn’t been outside, or even had a visitor, in two weeks.

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Social Media, The Great Equalizer