Web Hosting for Physical Therapists

The video problem, stated plainly

Here is how it happens. You film thirty exercises on a phone, because patients keep forgetting the sheet and calling to ask which way the band goes. Somebody uploads all thirty straight into the website's media library. It works when you test it, because you are on the clinic wifi and the file is already in your browser's cache.

Then a patient opens the page at home on a phone, on a slow connection, three days after their appointment. The video takes twenty seconds to start. It stops halfway through to buffer. They put the phone down and do the exercise from memory, badly, or they do not do it at all.

Nothing is broken. The plan did exactly what a shared hosting plan does. It served a very large file to a lot of people at once, one connection at a time, from one place. That is not what shared hosting is built for, and no tier upgrade turns it into a video service.

Why video is different from everything else on the site

• A page of text weighs a few hundred kilobytes. A single two minute clip from a modern phone can weigh more than your entire website.
• Text is delivered once and finished. Video is delivered continuously, for as long as somebody is watching, and every simultaneous viewer holds a connection open.
• A video file uploaded raw plays at whatever size and quality it was filmed at. A video service makes several versions and picks the right one for the viewer's connection. Your hosting does not do that.
• Home programmes cluster. Patients watch in the evening, and a clinic with a full caseload has a lot of people doing that at the same hour.

If your clinic has one welcome video on the homepage and nothing else, none of this applies to you. One clip is fine anywhere. The problem starts at the point where video becomes the product.

Delivering a home programme without building a portal

The instinct at this point is to build a patient portal. Logins, per-patient plans, progress tracking. It is almost always the wrong first move for a small clinic, because a login is the moment your website starts holding patient information, and that changes what the site is.

Once identifiable health information sits on a website, you are into questions about safeguards, agreements with whoever hosts it, and what happens if it leaks. Those questions have real answers, but they are not answers a hosting page should be giving you. Ask your own compliance adviser before you build anything that stores a patient's name next to their condition. Describing the problem is our job here. Deciding what your practice must do is theirs.

The good news is that most clinics do not need the portal to solve the problem they actually have, which is that patients forget their exercises. A public library of clearly named exercise pages does most of the work.

1. Film once, film properly

   One clean take per exercise, filmed landscape, with the whole body in frame and the therapist saying the cue out loud. Thirty tidy clips beat two hundred rough ones, and you only want to do this once.

2. Give every exercise its own page

   One exercise, one page, with the video embedded and the instructions written out underneath as ordinary text. The written version matters more than people expect: it is what a patient reads on a train with the sound off, and it is the only part a search engine can read.

3. Group them into named programmes

   A simple page called something like Post-operative knee, weeks one to three, linking to the six exercises it contains. Now the therapist hands out one short link instead of a list.

4. Hand the link over in the room

   Say the address out loud, write it on the appointment card, and make it short enough to type. A programme nobody can find again is the same as no programme.

5. Only then consider a portal

   If you get to the point where you genuinely need per-patient plans and progress tracking, buy a tool built for that rather than commissioning one. The compliance burden comes with the vendor rather than landing on you.

Written-out exercises have a second effect worth knowing about. Somebody searching for the name of the exercise their surgeon prescribed can find your clinic that way, and that person is often two miles from your door and not yet anybody's patient.

The second audience nobody writes for

Patients are not the only people looking at your site. Referring physicians, surgeons, case managers and athletic trainers look too, and they are looking for different things entirely. Most clinic websites are written as though this audience does not exist.

A referring office is trying to work out three things quickly. Whether you treat the thing they are sending. Whether the specific credential they care about is actually held by somebody on your staff. And how to get the referral to you without a phone call.

What that audience needs on the page

• Named therapists with their actual credentials and specialties, not a generic team paragraph.
• A plain list of conditions and post-operative protocols you handle, because that is what gets matched against a chart.
• A referral route that is not just the general contact form. A fax number, a dedicated address, a one page form to download.
• Which insurers you are in network with, kept current, because an out of network surprise comes back to the referrer.

That last group of items is the argument for having a proper address at your own domain rather than a free one. A referral coming to referrals@yourclinic is more likely to be trusted and more likely to arrive. The setup side of that is on the business email page.

If any of those pages will carry a downloadable form, make sure the site is served over HTTPS before you publish it. A browser warning on a page a physician's office is asked to use is an expensive small thing. See SSL certificates if you are not sure where yours stands.

How AldoMedia helps

AldoMedia has built and looked after websites for Western New York businesses since 1999, and a clinic site that slowed to a crawl after somebody uploaded the exercise library is a job we recognise on sight. We are an independent authorised reseller rather than the operator of the underlying platform, and if the plan you already pay for is the right one, we will tell you that and leave it alone.

Before you move anything, it is worth knowing that a site full of large video files makes for slow and unreliable backups, which is one more reason to get the video off it. The website backups page covers what a restore actually involves. Call 716-771-2536 or tell us what your clinic site runs on.