Telerehabilitation As An Opportunity In Physiotherapy:

Abstract

Telerehabilitation (TR) represents a new opportunity for physiotherapists to provide acceptable and high quality healthcare to their service users. The emerging evidence in the literature suggests the opportunity to integrate TR into the physiotherapy professional practice, even beyond the COVID-19 emergency, to ensure continuity of care up to the patient’s home and increase access to rehabilitation. One of the areas of application of TR is the management of non-specific low back pain (NLBP). NLBP has a high prevalence rate in the global population and it represents approximately 90% of low back pain cases. It is associated with the risk of chronicization, if not adequately managed, and extremely high costs associated with the treatment. Objective: to develop a proposal for a diagnostic-therapeutic care path (DTCP) on the use of TR in the management of patients with low back pain, taking into consideration the Italian legislation and the best scientific evidence available in the literature. Materials and methods: the bibliographical research in the literature was carried out on the electronic databases MEDLINE, PEDro, Embase, Trip database and Google Scholar was used to access the full-text of some articles. Discussion: the proposed DTCP for the management of the patient with low back pain takes into account the strengths and limitations of TR described in the literature and may represent a national reference model for the application of TR in patients with NLBP who access the outpatient territorial rehabilitation service. However, this proposal needs to be adapted to the specific socio-legislative regional context. The integration of TR to traditional clinic