How to do rehabilitation projects for 10 years without becoming a patient yourself

10 years since we Daria Tishina We are fanatical about helping people receive rehabilitation services that they cannot receive for various reasons.

This event reminded me of my parents’ events – “10 years of Reanimation”, “10 years of Surgery”.

10 years ago we started our first project “About Stroke”. It was a paper and digital guide for relatives of patients on how to organize rehabilitation at home. If anyone remembers encyclopedias on CDs, then the digital version of “About Stroke” looked exactly like this. At that time, we were very worried about the content, which would quickly be stolen if posted on the Internet, so we planned to distribute the application on disks and flash drives along with a paper manual. Now this is funny) Perhaps if they had immediately made it into a website format with articles and illustrations, they would now be earning millions by selling advertisements for tinctures on cones for stroke)

We chose a difficult path… The project has been closed for a long time, but many still associate us with it.

There is no information about this on Wikipedia, but for the first time in Belarus, Dasha and I held a mass event dedicated to the Day against Stroke. Without grants and government support! It was a busy and well-produced event in the shopping center of Grodno. A themed dance number, energetic fitness instructors, a cool presenter, and of course doctors and magnets with signs of stroke. The capital's media did not come because on that day the private entrepreneurs in Grodno went on strike at the clothing market. Such priorities…

Our first startup competition. Thanks to Alexander Skrobovsky from DŌBRA Impact Venture Studio! The energy and emotions are incredible! If I'm not mistaken, there were more than a hundred participants. I remember one of the spectators in the hall accused us of being interested in more strokes, and Dasha was ready to get into a fight with a mentor who convinced that patients need “more digital”, and this whole paper story is not in trend. By the way, a few years later this mentor released a paper notebook for startupers))

First popularity. After winning the competition, the most famous Belarusian media wrote about us, for which we immediately received a complaint from the chief rehabilitation specialist of the Republic of Belarus and from haters in the comments. “A doctor from Grodno made an application that will put you back on your feet after a stroke” – the headline of the article, which caused a storm of emotions from the Ministry of Health.))

Dasha is the same doctor from Grodno. For 10 years, she flew into space, to an intergalactic station with rehabilitation experts) For the last three years, she has led the Three Sisters rehabilitation clinic, and now runs the telemedicine clinic “On the mend”. As a modern doctor and medical director, Dasha has no equal.

Why did I specify “modern”? There is a stereotypical way of assessing a doctor’s competence based on length of service. For example, is 50 years as a neurologist in a clinic an indicator? Undoubtedly, experience is an important evaluation criterion. But the experience of a modern doctor with unlimited access to world research, updated statistics, and the opportunity to continuously learn online from the best specialists is very different from the experience of most “old school” doctors.

Did you know that being a physical therapist is one of the few professions that offers the job satisfaction of an airplane pilot?

If you have a boring job and AI is about to free you from it, know that there is a shortage of specialists in rehabilitation, whose work is difficult to delegate even to robots. This is a global trend.

Our project was born on this agenda “feezio – prescription exercises“

A dream, not an application! In 2018, we even planned to make a feature for training in augmented reality. There was no Apple Vision Pro then, only heavy and very expensive Microsoft Holo Lens! After one of the competitions, Samsung representatives contacted us and asked if we would like to refocus on fitness?

“Nothing like that,” I proudly answered then! Everyone does fitness, but we are about rehabilitation, we want to save people.

A high-quality project, a simple and convenient application, with a clear business model and value for users, but for now it’s a fake. There are too few users. We can’t understand why… Maybe it will still take off? I would be happy to discuss this topic with someone.

Physio is a designer of exercise programs that a physical therapy specialist (PT), speech therapist or occupational therapist prescribes for a patient to perform at home in the interval between face-to-face sessions with a therapist.

For the patient, this is an opportunity to increase the intensity of exercise and reduce the cost of rehabilitation. For specialists, this is an opportunity to quickly achieve rehabilitation goals, reduce the likelihood of “kickbacks” in patients’ recovery results, and earn money not only with their hands.

What conclusion did we draw from the previous two projects? That's right, we need another project!)

Meet Smart Rehab Manager Software for managing the scheduling of patients, staff, equipment and facilities in an inpatient rehabilitation clinic.

I was lucky, there was a request from a private rehabilitation clinic to organize the work of a multidisciplinary team and search for comprehensive software for managing the clinic. Since this all started.

Planning in an inpatient clinic, and even a rehabilitation clinic, is fundamentally different from traditional planning, so it was not possible to find a ready-made solution. The closest match to our request was software from Oracle Cerner and another American company with a 100-year history…

In the CIS they mistakenly make a connection with software for sanatoriums, but the only common feature there is for planning the placement of patients in wards, and then with a stretch of applicability in a rehabilitation clinic.

I quickly drew parallels between a multidisciplinary approach in treating patients and project management in IT, created a prototype based on a nocode platform and spreadsheets, and implemented it all into the work of the clinic. Works! Doctors and specialists give positive feedback, the number of requests for features is growing. But maintaining the functionality of such a system “made from what was” quickly became difficult. My attempts to assemble a zoo from different software and integrate them with each other were also unsuccessful.

Then there were two years of development, spent money from the sale of the apartment and it was done!

Where is the revolution, you ask? My answer is that rehabilitation will be more accessible if there are more rehabilitation centers.

Smart Rehab Manager – This is a business plan for the clinic. With the help of our software, even small rehabilitation clinics will be able to quickly launch, easily manage and scale their business in the same way as clinics that have spent years and millions of dollars on process automation.

I’ll tag Emilia Clarke on social networks under this text, she and I have a common goal – to make rehabilitation more accessible to more people. What if this incredible story happens when a post changes my life)

It's been a great 10 years!