Dana (00:01) Okay, welcome to episode two of the Future Proof PT podcast. It's a mouthful. I have to get used to saying it. I'm here again with my co-host Alex Bendersky. And we thought a great use of today's second podcast would be to allow me to interview Alex a bit about his time at the combined sections meeting for physical therapists this past week. And I think he just returned home yesterday, right, Alex?

Alex (00:29) Absolutely, absolutely.

Technically before midnight, so it was yesterday.

Dana (00:31) Okay. So we'll talk a little bit about some just high level takeaways from CSM and then touch on a couple of different topics that sort of came up from being at CSM. So just to tell you them in advance to listen for them, we're going to talk a little bit about the essence of physical therapy and Alex will get into what that is. And then the idea of the old guard in the physical therapy profession versus the new guard and what that means and the

the tension that we sometimes sense and kind of what we might, how we might want to think about that. And then a little bit about physical therapists, physical therapist assistants moving into non-clinical roles to what they think are greener pastures, but are they really greener pastures? What do we need to do to keep more physical therapists that want to be in clinical care in clinical care and why?

All right, Alex. So tell me and tell our audience a little bit about CSM this year and just some high level takeaways.

Alex (01:31) Yeah, so thank you, Dana. Thank you for your time. I appreciate this, the avenue to have a voice. I think it was wonderful. out of all the CSMs, you definitely see continued growth and continued investment from the ancillary industry into this musculoskeletal space. So you just see more vendors, larger avenues, higher level attendance, and definitely more...

thrown into the mix to attract clinicians to these specific organizations. So if we can count by the number of happy hours sponsored by legacy PT clinics, that this has been the most rewarding one. There's pretty much one for every legacy clinic, which reflects, right, the difficulty attracting stuff.

but it's definitely an excellent thought experiment about how the vendors view musculoskeletal industry and how the attendees view the musculoskeletal industry. And you have this ever present tension point between the vendors which see physical therapy as this potential revenue generator for their products or their services. And you see the clinicians, academic students who attend this to gain knowledge, expertise, or to just rub shoulders and gain

connections and network with other clinicians. And there's still, I think, a lack of pure understanding of what is the essence of, I would say physical therapy, but really I think applies to allied health sciences, where the industry is trying to create these solutions that will either supplement or complement in-person care without actually understanding that the true, I hate to use the word magic, but the true

mechanism of this clinical encounter that is involved in allied health sciences. So you see a proliferation of these computer vision.

providers that have been there before but now they're becoming a little more sophisticated, the technology is becoming more complex, the technology is also becoming more mature where you just no longer have this amateur looking game but you have these really high level AI supported computer vision products and processes that are designed and provided to take the exercise to the next level, to engage patients to next level.

But I think the way the systems are designed, they are creating this now a separation from like a PT no longer has to take care of exercise with the patient, our system will.

the reality is, right, that's the essence of physical therapy is not somebody counting repetitions, but the actual engagement and encounters and what you would call is patient centeredness that occurs during the traditional visit that doesn't need to be supplemented by technology. You can be supported, but this full essence, I think, of clinical care provision that as the old APTA logo, like the art of caring, the science of knowledge, whatever that logo was for PT, right?

Yeah, the art, I think the art of caring cannot be reproduced by high-level technology nor complemented. And so we're doing a decent job validating and creating the science, but the art still needs to be, I think, appreciated in order for that essence of clinical encounter in the musculoskeletal space to be embraced.

Dana (04:23) I can't remember.

Let

me just ask you a clarifying question because not being, you know, living and breathing PT on a day-to-day basis, I'm not sure that I know, and maybe some of our listeners don't, what computer vision technology is. Can you explain it for me?

Alex (04:58) Yeah, so there's these systems that, well let me go, I guess a step back. Computer vision is a form of artificial intelligence where these computer models and AI models that recognize movement and are able to quantify and break down movements into specific parts. It is a large part of these emerging high-level technology systems that can

detect anomalies and can also detect and monitor quantitative and qualitative movement, which can then be used as a resource for qualitative exercise performance. So these systems can use algorithms that both look at the movement from the qualitative standpoint, so just the range of motion, the precision, and...