The state of physical medicine: Integrating RTM into treatments

John C. Cianca, M.D., FAAPMR, president of the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, sees technology as a major asset for the specialty. Younger colleagues are now performing minimally invasive outpatient procedures that were unimaginable a generation ago, and that remote monitoring tools for fitness and physiological tracking hold further promise for a patient population with complex, ongoing health needs.

Medical Economics: Please discuss how physical medicine and rehabilitation physicians may be integrating remote therapeutic monitoring into their practices.

John C. Cianca, M.D., FAAPMR: I'm not, but I know some of my colleagues are, particularly people who have ongoing issues that need to be monitored, if you will. To some extent, we do that therapeutically with the treatment of spasticity and/or chronic pain by the use of central devices, pain pumps and spasticity pumps. And what we're doing is adjusting over time, using this technology to cater to their individual needs at any one point in time, either through pain management or spasticity management. There are other types of remote monitoring, obviously, that could help with fitness and/or monitoring physiology during fitness. Those are all good things, and I think we've long recognized that technology can be a real help to our population. Just think of the complexities of a disabled person and what we've done now with prosthetic limbs and power wheelchairs and ways of communicating with brain-injured individuals through the use of technology that was not available before. So we're a very practically oriented specialty, and I think the use of technology has really helped us stay practical and deliver treatments or adjuncts to treatment that make the care relevant and timely, as well as up to date. So I think technology has been a boon for our field, and I think we've been very good at adopting it and and moving forward and actually innovating it. I have younger colleagues who are doing things that I never could have imagined we were doing, and this is in the outpatient setting, treating problems through microsurgical techniques that aren't really surgery and are done in an outpatient setting, and the patient goes home the same day.