Patients who have undergone joint replacements are now skipping physical therapy, according to Philly.com.
Here are five things to know:
1. Some patients are going to inpatient facilities for rehab, others are skipping home care and going straight to outpatient therapy and a number of patients are getting no professional physical therapy at all.
2. New payment schemes that encourage surgeons and hospitals to pay more attention to the cost and effectiveness of the care patients get when they leave the hospital has made post-surgical rehab a target for cuts.
3. About 74,000 people in Pennsylvania and New Jersey had total knee or hip replacements in 2013. Virtua health system officials estimated that a typical stay in a nursing home after surgery costs $12,000 to $15,000, and an average home-care episode costs $3,500.
4. In 2011, 42 percent of Rothman Institute knee-replacement patients and 25 percent of those with new hips went to an inpatient facility after surgery. Those numbers dropped to 15 percent and 11 percent respectively during the first 10 months of this year. Meanwhile, patients who went straight home with only outpatient physical therapy rose from 13 percent to 62 percent for knee replacements and from 10 percent to 74 percent for hip replacements.
5. A physical therapist in the area started Force Therapeutics in 2010 to improve the stick-figure pictures to help patients with at-home exercises. The company also uses a physical therapy web portal. Rothman had 400 patients in the program in 2013 and expects 8,000 this year.