Pembroke Entrepreneurs: Improving physical therapy with PT Partner

Taylor Miller (2018) was a finalist in the 2019 Parmee Prize. He was pitching PT Partner, a device that will help total knee replacement patients with their physical therapy, with the aim of cutting their recovering time and reducing complications.

Where did the idea for PT Partner come from?

We had a hackathon one weekend in the US, where I’m at medical school, and I,  with a partner and a team of people, came up with this idea for PT Partner. It’s is a device you use for patients in physical therapy.  It can track movements to make sure patients are doing the exercises and doing them correctly.

Why is this needed?

In the United States physical therapy is really important for recovery. It’s important everywhere, but in the United States there’s recently been a policy change where orthopaedic surgeons have to pay out of pocket for any complications or slow recoveries. So there’s now a big business case and a big need in the hospital community for ways to help patients recover quickly and with fewer complications.

Why are you specifically looking at knee surgery?

There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that these bundled payment models that create this incentive for physicians, they’re only for a few different types of procedures, there’s total knee replacement, there’s hip replacement. The knee seemed to be the simplest for creating a device to support physical therapy. There’s only so many ways the knee can move! We’re looking at expanding from there but we want to start with the knee. There’s a lot of literature about physical therapy helping after knee replacement surgery.

And it will help both the patient and their physical therapist?

Yeah, the idea is at the moment is that when patients go home after a knee replacement they come to the office a little bit just to check in and to get new exercises, but most of physical therapy is done at home. So the physical therapist has no idea most of the time what’s going on; the patient’s supposed to be doing physical therapy but they don’t know if they’re doing it right or doing it at all. For the therapist it would allow them to have a window into their patient’s home and make sure they’re doing it and doing it correctly, and follow up if they’re not.  For the physician you have measurements making sure patients are improving, they can see progress, and intervene if it’s not working out. And for the patient the app can walk them through the exercises, they can see their progress and their improvement over time, and they can hopefully improve.

The app will walk you through the exercise by showing you an animation of what you need to do. You should have already done that with the physical therapist so you know what you’re supposed to do, but a week later you may not remember exactly the ten exercises you were given to go home with. The app would remind you, and it would then track you doing the exercise.

You’re a US medical student, but also a Pembroke student. What is it you’re studying here?

I’m doing a technology policy MPhil in Cambridge. I’m very interested in digital healthcare and informatics, how hospitals and hospital systems use data to improve care. And a big part of that is moving care from the hospital to potentially at home, to avoid the problems that can come from being in a hospital. 

It’s a really interesting course. It’s based in the Judge Business School. They take people with hard science backgrounds, so it’s mostly engineers, some biochemistry people, some maths people. It’s training in the policy and business side of science. So there’s a lot of energy, renewable energy, climate change stuff, and a lot of questions around data regulation, GDPR, and all that. And in the healthcare aspect which is what I’m interested in, a lot around patient data, how that should be used and how hospitals should be collecting data and using it in digital healthcare.

What’s next for you?

I want to work clinically. I’m going to do emergency medicine after my MPhil. With emergency medicine often people take on either research or administrative roles on the side, so I’m interested in working in healthcare informatics alongside my clinical work.