The Importance Of Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation is key for a variety of acute and chronic diseases. It can eliminate the consequences of the disease or at least mitigate them, so that participation in socioeconomic life and / or the working capacity is restored. With intensive treatment in the hospital, the patient can achieve great progress in a short time.

After discharge, patients are challenged to continue the prescribed measures (e.g. exercise programs, nutrition plans) on their own. Patients are indeed often dismissed in a highly motivated state from inpatient rehabilitation but their compliance decreases quickly. Reasons for this include the changes back to the home environment and the lack of feedback. As the patient is not under permanent supervision of medical experts,

Overview of rehabilitation process

Knowing the quality of the rehabilitation activities of the patient helps doctors to detect and prevent readmission risk before they occur. With the emerging trend of

Quantified Self, patients are now able to track their rehabilitation activities as well as fitness activities and habits including sleeping, daily routine etc. with consumer grade technology. This data can be used to calculate health risk and provide alerts to medical experts and the patient. In this way, patients receive more targeted monitoring and management post discharge and thereby enjoy a higher quality of care, better outcomes and higher satisfaction. At the same time, costs to the healthcare system of unplanned readmissions are minimized.

2. Rehabilitation Risks as Cost Drivers in Healthcare

2.1. Cost Drivers in Healthcare

For many decades, healthcare spending and its influencing factors have been studied intensively, resulting in a wide range of social and economic factors. A large proportion of health expenditure is reflected in the cost of hospitals, accounting for 30% of the increase in total health expenditure of the inpatient hospital sector, followed by the pharmaceutical area in second place. Factors influencing hospital costs include

Through lack of discipline or lack of support, patients often don’t carry out the recommended practice sessions efficiently or not regularly, which can lead to an inevitable loss of rehabilitation success and consequently costly aftercare and unplanned readmission to the hospital [5]. Thus, for rehabilitation after acute diseases, such as joint replacements, movement tracking (e.g. by counting steps) is a first easy way to monitor patient behaviour in the home rehabilitation process.

More advanced methods involve the use of 3D sensors for movement analysis during exercises, for example.

For patients with chronic diseases, which account for the biggest part of readmissions to the hospital, the monitoring of simple values can heavily support the pre-emptive detection of patient deterioration. Most prominently, renal failure, Septicemia, diabetes, psychotic disorders, airway disease and cardiac disease often result in readmissions to the hospital [27]. The collection of data to support monitoring these diseases at home can range from simple devices, such as digital scales (e.g. to track fluid fluctuations