Patient information recording tool to support clinical information collection for inexperienced physiotherapists

Abstract

In the early stages of physiotherapy, collecting clinical information is crucial for assessing a patient’s body status and creating an appropriate treatment plan. However, inexperienced physiotherapists spend too much time gathering information and sometimes overlook important details, which can lead to inaccurate assessments. To assist these inexperienced practitioners, we propose a portable note-taking tool to facilitate the efficient collection of patient information. This tool organizes evaluation items into four categories: “Basic Information,” “Medical Information,” “Social Information,” and “Physiotherapy Evaluation,” enabling users to systematically and effectively gather the necessary patient information while understanding the scope of the information required. We conducted a comparative experiment to assess the tool’s availability, involving seven physiotherapy students and fifteen novice physiotherapists (those within their first three years of practice). The results showed that our proposed tool was more effective than conventional recording methods in terms of both the number of evaluation items recorded and the time taken for clinical information collection.