Though employers and workers’ compensation insurers have been utilizing telemedicine for quite some time, the Insurance Journal reports that there has been a recent uptick in interest surrounding virtual physical therapy, also known as telerehab.

Telerehab provides virtual access to physical therapy and is intended to be a replacement for an in-person visit to an outpatient facility. According to a recent white paper released by MedRisk, while not all treatment is translatable to telerehab, “online exercise demos, virtual workout supervision, and secure communication tools make it possible to supplement in-clinic physical therapy with valuable remote services including patient follow-ups, home treatment plans, questions and answers, and consultations with specialists.”

Sean Sullivan, chief operating officer and vice president of Business Development for the national rehab and wellness provider Go2Care, said telerehab can include the whole spectrum of what is called “musculoskeletal care management.”

According to Michelle Despres, vice president and national product leader at workers’ compensation firm One Call, telerehab is convenient because it can be done via a cell phone, tablet or a computer. The process can work via live or pre-recorded videos and mobile apps, said Despres. Remote patient monitoring can be achieved by using health and fitness trackers or through patient self-reporting.

“They would have access to one on one live treatment with a physical therapist (PT), the idea being that there’s a convenience factor. If someone would like to be treated, we offer hours between 6:00 AM and 10:00 PM. There’s a lot of flexibility. Most outpatient clinics are not open to those hours,” added Despres. “There may be a possibility that someone could say at lunchtime, ‘I’m going to do my PT. I’m not going to leave my office. I’m going to do it right here.'” She added that injured workers could do it anywhere they have the privacy and the availability to perform their visit.

Highly adaptable, telerehab can begin with online videoconferencing and move toward live, face to face interaction, according to Sullivan of Go2Care.

“We’re also looking at telerehab being defined as a home exercise program support application. This is an apps based concept,” said Despres. “It allows the treating therapist in the brick and mortar facility to offer their individual patients and injured workers the ability to log into an app, much like a fitness app, that many people use on their phones or their tablets and have the opportunity to have their home program delivered electronically.”

While there’s been traction in both the group health and Medicare markets, there has been a slow adoption rate by the workers’ compensation industry, despite the fact the concept has been around for quite a while, said Sullivan.

“In workers’ compensation, to my knowledge no one yet has any deliverable data or outcomes information to be able to say that it’s being adopted at X rate in the work comp space,” said Despres.

“There was a push, not from the carriers but from – the employers,” said Sullivan. “I’m having a lot of carriers come to me saying, ‘We want to do it,’ but they don’t know where to start. When the carriers right now are talking to me, they’re saying, ‘Do we do the prevention? Do we do the treatment, or do we do the monitoring?'” He expects carriers will pilot one or all three aspects to determine the best fit.

Not much is needed for telerehab to work, said Sullivan and Despres. “They don’t require anything except the injured worker has to have their own Wi-Fi or their own device a cell phone, a smartphone or a tablet, or a computer,” said Despres. The employer doesn’t have to set up anything, though they might choose to offer a private room that employees could use at lunchtime or at their own discretion.

“It can be done from anywhere. We’re servicing a manufacturing site in rural America. There’s not a whole lot around it, but there are 600 employees,” Sullivan said. “We just set up a kiosk at the location. The employee has the freedom to elect to conduct that visit in the comfort of their home, should they choose. But they’re not choosing that, at least, to date.”