Investigating the use of digital health tools in physiotherapy: facilitators and barriers.

BACKGROUND: Digital tools are becoming more and more common in healthcare. Their potential to improve treatment, monitoring, and coaching in physiotherapy has been recognized. Yet studies report that the adoption of digital health tools in ambulatory physiotherapy is rather low and that their potential is underexploited. OBJECTIVE: This paper aims to investigate how digital health tools in general, and the mobile health tool physitrackTM (hereafter the app) more particularly, are used in outpatient physiotherapy clinics and also to identify what facilitates or hinders the app's use. METHODS: The paper is part of a larger study and adopts an ethnographic approach. It is based on observational and interview data collected at two outpatient clinics. RESULTS: We reveal how physiotherapists and patients use the app in physiotherapy and identify 16 interdependent factors, on the macro-, meso-, and micro-level, that either facilitate or hinder its use. CONCLUSIONS: We argue that a single factor's facilitating or hindering impact cannot be grasped in isolation but needs to be investigated as one piece of a dynamic interplay. Further qualitative research is required, especially to shed more light on the app's compatibility with physiotherapy practice and use in therapist-patient interactions.

Influence of interactional structure on patient's participation during interprofessional discharge planning meetings in rehabilitation centers.

Interprofessional practice has become increasingly important. In addition, patients are expected to participate more actively in health-care decisions. While comprehensive discharge planning has been shown to be effective, it is unclear how interactional structure influences patients' participation during discharge planning meetings. The aims of this qualitative study were to examine the interactional structure of interprofessional meetings in two rehabilitation clinics and to identify patients' types of communicative involvement (patient participation) during discharge planning meetings. Using an ethnomethodological approach and Conversation Analysis, 121 interprofessional meetings were video-recorded (19 hours of recordings). Twenty-five patients (30- 87 years) with neurological or musculoskeletal disorders and their teams were included. The findings revealed two types of meetings aimed at either (a) exchanging information with team members and patient ("information exchange meeting") or (b) negotiating care plans with patients and the team. "Negotiation meetings" were often led by allied health professionals or nurses and were characterized by active patient participation. Those meetings offered patients an opportunity to give additional information rather than only ask questions. The discussion includes reflections on how interactional analysis can help understand the social organization of meetings and how patient participation can be enhanced in this context and concludes with practice implications.

Professionals' embodied orientations towards patients in discharge-planning meetings and their impact on patient participation.

To enhance the patient's involvement, clinical guidelines on rehabilitation require the patient's participation in the entire rehabilitation process, including discharge planning (DP). However, very little is known about how this institutional demand is actually dealt with in everyday clinical practice. Adopting a conversation analytic (CA) approach, our paper tackles the matter by looking at interdisciplinary entry meetings (IEMs) at a rehabilitation clinic in German-speaking Switzerland. Our study is based on audio-visual recordings of 11 IEMs, whose central aim is to formulate patients' rehabilitation goals and to plan their discharge. The paper offers a detailed analysis of the embodied practices through which healthcare professionals seek to involve patients in the IEMs, and also investigates patients' responses. Our analysis shows that, although carefully elaborated, the professionals' practices do not elicit more than reactive patient participation. The paper argues that this is due to (1) the practices' temporal positioning within the overall activity structure of the meeting - they are deployed when no important decision is at stake, projecting minimal patient participation on the phases in which decisions are taken - and (2) the actions the practices project on the next turn: confirmation, acknowledgement or ratification of what has previously been proposed by professionals.