Listening Time — 29:39
This learning health system can serve as a blueprint for physical therapists to make optimal use of routinely collected clinical data for improving care for patients with a variety of conditions.
It all started with a desire to give back to patients—to the community of people on whom health data are collected. "Can we give back those data on the level of the individual patient? Can we use that data to make better decisions for the person who is sitting in front of you?" Anneroos Sinnige, MD, and Thomas Hoogeboom, PT, PhD, share their experiences with a nationwide infrastructure to routinely collect data from daily practice and how these data were used through a support system to improve physical therapy care for patients with intermittent claudication in the Netherlands. Patients as well as physical therapists were inspired by the process. ClaudicatioNet is a nationwide network of 2100 specialized physical therapists, providing supervised exercise therapy in combination with lifestyle counseling, and the ClaudicatioNet Quality system is a learning health system to support continuous learning at the therapist, practice, and network level. Both individual patients and physical therapists are able to personalize, benchmark, evaluate—and modify—a treatment plan using routinely collected data from historical patients. Find out how they plan to expand this effort to other chronic conditions.
You might also like this article from PTJ, "Supervised Exercise Therapy for Intermittent Claudication."
Speakers
Alan M. Jette, PT, PhD, FAPTA, is editor-in-chief of PTJ: Physical Therapy & Rehabilitation Journal.
Anneroos Sinnige, MD, is a physician in the Department of Vascular Surgery, Catharina Hospital and ClaudicatioNet, Eindhoven, the Netherlands.
Thomas J. Hoogeboom, PT, PhD, Radboud University Medical Center, Radboud Institute for Health Sciences, IQ Healthcare, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.