Illustration credit: A.E. Kieren
Bundled payments for hip and knee replacements are coming to a city near you. Under a new CMS rule, 67 select metropolitan areas must switch over to lump-sum reimbursement in April, which means a whole lot of orthopedic surgeons will soon be at risk for a whole lot of money.
FORCE Therapeutics contracts with surgeons and hospitals to minimize that risk while at the same time reducing overhead. By providing at-home rehab and recovery tools online, Spira’s company believes it can substantially reduce office visits. “Instead of seeing my patients three or four times a week, I can see them far fewer times but still collect data remotely and feed that back to the providers,” she explains.
During her years as a physical therapist, Spira was struck time and again by how the best recoveries relied not on office visits themselves but rather on patients’ adherence between those visits. “Unfortunately, the status quo before FORCE was patients were given stick-figure diagrams and expected to go home and do these intricate exercises designed to help them recover,” she notes. Clearly online videos would be more illustrative, and thus the idea for her company was born.
Four years old and growing, FORCE finds itself at the vanguard of value-based care. “We feel we’re leaders in musculoskeletal rehab and recovery care on a digital platform,” Spira says. “We plan to be in the hands of every patient who has an injury or has had surgery in the not-too-distant future.”
