Medbridge, a digital care company, launched new AI-powered motion-capture capabilities on Thursday through its digital musculoskeletal and movement-based medicine platform.
The Bellevue, Washington-based company works with clinicians, hospitals, and health systems to tackle musculoskeletal (MSK) issues. Its customers include Intermountain Health, Kaiser Permanente and AdventHealth. The company provides an AI-driven software platform that helps clinicians treat patients through hybrid care. Patients can log into the company’s MSK program, Pathways, to perform AI-monitored therapeutic exercises, receive guidance on managing their condition and track their progress. Clinicians can then monitor their patients’ activity to better understand how they’re doing.
With the new motion capture capabilities, patients can get more accurate feedback on exercises while using their mobile phone or computer’s camera. The camera will use Medbridge’s motion capture to detect body parts and positioning and provide feedback to the clinician and patient in real time. It also identifies possible fall risks. This technology was previously only available for lower back pain, but is now available for pain in the neck, elbows, hips, knees and other areas.
“This real-time feedback not only helps patients instantly but also empowers them and their clinician to work together on future exercises and education for better, faster outcomes. … We also use AI to summarize and surface the most recent patient activity and patient results in our partner clinician’s EHR, helping them quickly grasp what the patient has been doing — and how they’ve been doing — when they’ve been out of the office,” said Donovan Campbell, CEO of Medbridge, in an email.
In addition, the company offers an AI chatbot that allows patients to ask questions and receive responses on MSK care.
Medbridge will track the success of these new AI capabilities by measuring patient pain management, physician function, patient satisfaction and patient engagement, according to Campbell.
The company launched these new capabilities to combat the healthcare shortage, which will only get worse “as America ages, clinician burnout increases, and the lack of providers becomes increasingly profound,” Campbell said. He noted that currently, pelvic health therapy appointment wait times range from six weeks to six months in the U.S.
“We believe that the future of care looks like AI doing what AI can, while humans do what humans should,” he said. “Without offloading care and administrative capacity to AI agents that can augment the total availability of human care capacity, we will have to ration care in the future. Put simply, if we don’t start bringing AI into patient care, people who need care won’t be able to get it.”
Medbridge isn’t the only company offering MSK support. Others include Hinge Health and Sword Health, though Medbridge differs because it sells software instead of services.
Thai Noipho, Getty Images
