The future of occupational medicine
Occupational or occupational medicine is a complex field whose maximum representation in our country lies in the figure of mutual societies or Mutual Collaborators with Social Security, which are in charge of managing the professional contingencies of the personnel at the service of associated employers.
Perhaps it is appropriate to shed some light in numerical terms that indicate the importance of the role played by these entities: according to the latest progress published by the Spanish government, the total number of accidents at work in the first quarter of 2022 was 274,993, 53.63% of them being accidents that have caused the worker’s sick leave. This is only an indication of the magnitude of resources that are allocated to clinical care in occupational health.
In addition to medical consultations and nursing services, physiotherapy becomes a fundamental part of a mutual assistance service, since its function is to return the patient to an optimal functional state to restart their activity.
Taking into account the paradigmatic change that the appearance of digital health implies, Mutua Egarsat has taken the determination to go digital and optimize the processes they carry out to provide service to a growing number of users.
To do this, they have decided to start a digital rehabilitation project with our platform, TRAK, to demonstrate that digitization has a positive impact on the operation of the physiotherapy service, adapting the sessions to the needs of the patient and speeding up the recovery process.
Telerehabilitation in mutual: Egarsat and TRAK
The fundamental objective of the pilot that has been organized with TRAK is to guarantee the assistance of the Egarsat mutualists outside their geographical range.
A total of 38 patients with different pathologies have participated in the pilot: low back pain and cervical pain, of which 52.6% were referred to emergency rehabilitation or primary care. The rest received a prescription for physiotherapy treatment from a specialist.
It has consisted of a rehabilitation process for users in which face-to-face sessions were carried out combined with two group videoconference sessions and telerehabilitation sessions with TRAK.
The results have been encouraging and augur a revolution in the healthcare field of mutuals:
The patients who underwent telerehabilitation reduced the days of sick leave from 40 to 37 and the average number of sessions required for their rehabilitation from 14 to 8. “With digital physiotherapy, 80% of our patients achieve functional recovery. The most significant thing is that the patients began telerehabilitation and shortly after starting it, they recovered and were discharged”, indicates the coordinator of the Egarsat physiotherapy area.
Our artificial intelligence algorithm only needs the camera of a mobile device or a laptop to detect the movements that the patient makes in each exercise and thus offer corrections in real time. The healthcare professional can also create personalized exercise protocols in less than a minute and monitor the patient’s progress with exercise metrics.
Jon Vital, executive director of TRAK, states that he is “enthusiastic” with the project: “the field of Mutual Collaborators with the S.S. is one of the fundamental pillars of the guarantee system enjoyed by workers in our country. Contributing our bit of arena to improving and optimizing not only the quality of care, but also the resources allocated to occupational medicine, makes us proud as a company, especially if it is hand in hand with an institution like Egarsat”.
The implementation of a digitization service in its service makes Egarsat a pioneer among the institutions in its field by applying AI to improve the service it offers its users, especially for those to whom it cannot offer assistance in its centers own but that require monitoring of their treatment.