A New Year is an Opportunity to Serve All Patients – the Neubie® Grant Program for Clinics in Underserved Communities

Jan 10, 2022

Happy New Year!!

From all of us at NeuFit®, we want to wish you a very happy new year.  To our patients who are starting the year recovering from an injury or surgery, we hope 2022 will be a year full of progress and new achievements. To our athletes, amateur and professional alike, who are seeking to take their performance to new heights this year, we look forward to being on your team and helping you realize your goals. And to our wonderful provider community, we hope your clinics will prosper and serve more patients as you help them on their journey to reduce pain, increase mobility and achieve their health goals.  The promise of a new year always excites us, and we can’t wait to see what our growing NeuFit community of providers and patients will accomplish in 2022. 

Physical Therapy for Underserved Communities

A new year is a time of reflection for many of us as we consider where we’ve been and what we want to achieve in the new year. Much has been written about the unevenness of our health care system and how access to care and the latest technologies favors those with more means or who live in more affluent urban communities. 

In May 2010, Physical Therapy, published ‘Access to Physical Therapy Services Among Medically Underserved Adults: A Mixed-Method Study, which profiled the structural, utilization of care and outcome barriers that exist. Among these were a lack of standardized screening or assessment processes to identify physical mobility problems among people with chronic health conditions. (1) 

A 2019 study examined the facilitators and barriers to physical therapy access as described by residents and health care providers in a largely African American community in Chicago. Among the barriers reported by both residents and HCPs were the cost of PT and an incomplete knowledge of PT. The authors concluded that future research should focus on increasing awareness about the benefits of PT and developing low-cost PT options. (2)

These are just two examples of research that has identified gaps in knowledge and access that have made it difficult for underserved communities to benefit from physical therapy services. 

Neubie® Trial Grant Program

With these inequities in mind, we introduced the Neubie trial grant as part of our commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. This program is specifically for clinics focused on an underserved patient community.  Each quarter, we select a PT clinic from among those who have applied for a trial grant and provide them with a Neubie device, together with all our training, for three months at no charge. 

The goal of our grant program is to help patients who might not otherwise be able to access the Neubie device and the NeuFit Method experience the benefits. PT clinics are eligible if they can demonstrate through our application process that they work with an underserved population, wish to make a difference in people’s lives and get them back to doing what they love, and share the core values of NeuFit. 

Once the three-month free trial ends, if the PT clinic loves the results and the impact that they are making with their Neubie device and the NeuFit Method, we work with them to provide a customized offer so that they can keep using their Neubie device. 

Clinics interested in learning more about the Neubie Trial Grant program can contact us at NeuFit for more information. We look forward to continuing this program in 2022 and helping the participating clinics introduce the benefits of the Neubie device to their patients. 

Let’s charge forward to better outcomes together! 

 

Citations

  1. Christine A. McCallum, Access to Physical Therapy Services Among Medically Underserved Adults: A Mixed-Method Study, Physical Therapy, Volume 90, Issue 5, 1 May 2010, Pages 735–747, https://doi.org/10.2522/ptj.20090242
  2. Huber GM, Bitzer G, Corazzi C, Fitzsimmons S, Melissa H, Shelley J, Hollowell A, Healey WE. Access to Physical Therapy in a Medically Underserved, Urban Community. J Health Care Poor Underserved. 2019;30(2):768-788. doi: 10.1353/hpu.2019.0055. PMID: 31130550. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31130550/