Rather than just focusing on the implant itself, orthopedic firms are focusing on the entire “episode of care,” which begins with consultation and ends with post-operative monitoring. Global orthopedic firm Zimmer Biomet embraced this strategy two years ago with the launch of mymobility with Apple Watch and iPhone, a virtual care team of sorts that provides patients with support and guidance at the direction of their clinician when preparing for and recovering from orthopedic procedures while in their own home.
 
At the beginning of December, the firm announced mymobility with Apple Watch will be able to implement Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) Orthopedic Care Pathways. HSS Orthopedic Care Pathways consist of customized patient content created by HSS healthcare professionals, including pre-op and post-op care protocols, exercises, surveys, questionnaires, educational materials, and clinical parameters.
 
To get more insight into this mymobility, the collaboration with HSS, and how this will affect the orthopedic industry and patient care, I spoke with Ivan Tornos, Group President for Global Businesses and the Americas at Zimmer Biomet.
 
Sam Brusco: What unmet need is this responding to in orthopedic care management?
 
Ivan Tornos: It’s more critical now than ever before for healthcare professionals to have access to virtual approaches to safely care and connect with patients. Our partnership with Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) to deploy and commercialize HSS Orthopedic Care Pathways on Zimmer Biomet's mymobility with Apple Watch, a first-of-its-kind remote care management platform, will help make virtual care a new standard for orthopedic patients across the globe.
 
As remote care-management tools are not yet broadly adopted, some clinical teams are looking to leverage best practices to customize patient education and care. With the HSS care-pathways, they’ll be able to utilize content from the clinical leader in this space right out of the box.
 
Brusco: What are mymobility’s origins?
 
Tornos: Zimmer Biomet has been focused on digitally transforming the patient care journey, including the launch of mymobility nearly two years ago. The mymobility platform was built by Zimmer Biomet in collaboration with the Health team at Apple. mymobility creates a personalized, guided experience for patients, with the goal of creating more connection, better communications touchpoints, greater efficiency, and to facilitate patient outcomes without adding the burden to the healthcare system. 
 
Brusco: How does use of the Apple Watch specifically improve care management?
 
Tornos: mymobility with Apple Watch brings all the key elements of care together in a way that provides surgeons greater oversight and guidance of their patients’ recovery through a highly engaged, connected experience, regardless of a patient or physician’s physical location. With mymobility with Apple Watch, surgeons have a real-time way to check on their patients’ progress between office visits and use data to help patients who need the most attention, sooner. Additionally, surgeons may decide to continue—and even shift—a patient’s care without requiring an in-office visit.
 
We recently presented preliminary results from a clinical trial to evaluate the impact of mymobility with Apple Watch at the 2020 AAHKS annual meeting. The data show that using the mymobility remote care management platform on Apple Watch and iPhone for primary knee arthroplasty demonstrated similar early outcomes to traditional care models, while requiring significantly fewer physical therapy visits. In addition, the mymobility cohort of patients reported fewer emergency department visits and lower rates of hospital readmission.
 
Apple Watch is a valuable part of mymobility platform. The watch enhances the quality of the data we can collect and helps keep the patient engaged in their care. Apple has built movement and physiologic measurement capability into the Watch, and through it and the iPhone we are able to track not just the quantity of steps, but metrics indicative of the quality of the patient’s gait, and various other types of activity. Since the Watch is always on the patient’s wrist, it also helps with the fidelity of the data we can collect.
 
Furthermore, to provide an end-to-end connected care surgical experience, data from mymobility with Apple Watch and the ROSA Knee surgical robotics system feeds into OrthoIntel, Zimmer Biomet’s Orthopedic Intelligence Platform, connecting progress and metrics throughout the episode of care. This helps surgeons optimize intelligence and analytics and uncover insights about how to improve patient outcomes.

 
Brusco: What do you hope to achieve by featuring HSS Orthopedic Care Pathways on mymobility?
 
Tornos: Featuring HSS Orthopedic Care Pathways is an important step in transforming how care is delivered to orthopedic patients. With HSS’s world-class expertise combined with Zimmer Biomet’s legacy of proven expertise and trust, HSS Orthopedic Care Pathways on Zimmer Biomet's mymobility with Apple Watch will help raise standards and provide new possibilities for remote patient care. HSS Orthopedic Care Pathways are comprised of pre-operative, intra-operative, inpatient, and post-operative care protocols, exercises, surveys, questionnaires, education materials, and clinical parameters for patients.
 
In 2021, we will launch the HSS Orthopedic Care Pathways and it will soon after be commercially available through the mymobility with Apple Watch program to support healthcare systems and clinicians around the world. In addition, mymobility with Apple Watch will be offered to HSS patients undergoing treatment at HSS facilities, providing those patients a new level of access to information about their procedure and connection to their care team. 
 
Brusco: What’s in the near future re mymobility?
 
Tornos: Next year will be busy for the mymobility with Apple Watch platform. We will continue to bring new capabilities to the platform that extend and enhance the patient and clinician experience. We are also continuing to extend the data collection and analytics capabilities. Earlier this year, Zimmer Biomet, in partnership with Apple, announced and demonstrated the implementation of gait data on the platform enabling us to provide a qualitative assessment of a patient’s gait. The quality, not just quantity, of steps matter, and this technology enables healthcare professionals to compare their patients’ progress against a database to better manage post-operative care and identify issues sooner.
 
Looking ahead, Zimmer Biomet remains committed to offering patients, physicians and providers an ecosystem of solutions across the entire episode of care. With this ecosystem, we look to solve a much broader range of problems—providing patients with the right implant for their individual cases, physicians with greater outcomes in the most efficient fashion, and providers with the most value through technologies that can help reduce the length of stay, minimize complications, and generate better outcomes. mymobility is one piece of the puzzle to this connected care ecosystem.