What Medbridge costs a clinic, from one clinician to a team

Medbridge pricing sits on two pages, one for clinicians buying a plan for themselves and one for practices buying seats for a team, and every price on both is in US dollars. Between them the plans cover home exercise programmes, a patient app and continuing education. TriageFit's clinic partnership works beside whichever of them a practice holds, and its part begins when a patient is discharged and wants a coach for what comes next.

Plans for one clinician

A physio buying a plan alone chooses between Premium and Education, each sold as one of Medbridge's 12-month subscriptions, paid in full at sign-up and renewed on the date of purchase.

Premium costs $389 a year, and the page gives $455 as its list price. It includes everything in the Education plan, plus more than 8,000 exercise videos across more than 20 specialties, more than 1,000 patient education items, a drag-and-drop programme builder, the Medbridge Go app for iOS and Android and an online patient portal. Education is $339 a year, down from a listed $405, and is the plan for a clinician who wants the courses without the exercise library.

On these plans, Medbridge offers a refund within 30 days for an account with no activity on it. Its support team works 6am to 5pm Pacific time, Monday to Friday, so a practice in Ireland or Britain can reach it from the early afternoon.

Seats for a practice

A practice buying for its team pays for each seat by the year. Care Essentials, the lower of Medbridge's two Care plans, is $169 a year for each seat, and the plan gives the full home exercise library, 100 episodes of care for each seat each year pooled across the organisation, then $1.50 an episode, and patient-reported outcomes with analytics for the organisation.

Care Elite costs $209 a year for each seat. It keeps everything in Care Essentials and adds unlimited home exercise episodes, with remote therapeutic monitoring and Guided Care Pathways charged at $10 an episode. Medbridge describes those pathways as programmes of progressive assessments, education and exercises for patients of low to moderate acuity, run independently or alongside in-person care. An episode starts with the first exercise, education item or outcome measure added to a home exercise programme, and charges that depend on use, such as episodes past the Care Essentials allowance, are billed monthly, in arrears.

Each Care plan can also be bought with courses. The bundle at $329 a year for each seat is Care Essentials together with Education Essentials, its full continuing education library, and the one at $369 a year for each seat is Care Elite together with Education Essentials. Education Essentials is also sold on its own, at $279 a year for each seat.

Payment for a group plan is by any credit card, through its online cart, and there are no refunds on group subscriptions. For a team that changes size, Medbridge sets out the terms: seats added or upgraded at any time at a prorated price, removed only in the renewal window, and moved between staff. Past a certain size, the route in is a demo request for 50 seats or more.

Buying from Ireland or Britain

For an Irish or British practice, the payment rules matter as much as the prices. Medbridge's business pricing page says group plans take payment only from organisations in the United States, Canada or Australia. Its main pricing page says individual plans can be bought from anywhere in the world.

Read together, those two rules steer such a practice, when it buys online, towards individual plans, one for each clinician, with Premium carrying the exercise library and the patient app. Each of those plans renews on its own purchase date, so a team whose clinicians sign up at different times has several renewal dates to keep track of.

Courses and credit outside the US

The Education plan covers on-demand and live continuing education courses, Medbridge certificates, certification prep programmes, compliance training, short soft-skills courses and a mobile app for the clinician. For a team, the courses come as Education Essentials, which both bundles include.

On accreditation, Medbridge's own answer is that its courses earn continuing education credits that are not accredited outside the US. For clinicians practising elsewhere, it provides a certificate of completion for each course, which a clinician can submit to their own accrediting body to seek credit. For a physio in Ireland or Britain, how far that certificate counts is a matter for whichever body sets their continuing professional development requirements.

Medbridge beside the clinic partnership

A practice can hold a Medbridge plan and be a TriageFit partner at the same time, because Medbridge is paid for by the practice or its clinicians and TriageFit by the patient.

Home exercise programme software puts Medbridge's prices next to those of Physitrack, Wibbi and Rehab My Patient, Wibbi's pricing for clinics covers a platform that prices every plan by quote, and Physitrack alternatives is written for a clinic thinking of leaving Physitrack.

From discharge to a coached programme

Some patients leave their last appointment wanting more than a home programme, whether that is a return to five-a-side, their first proper strength training or fitness beyond where they were before the injury. TriageFit coaches that next stage.

The patient begins with an intake of roughly half an hour, which they can pause and come back to. They pin the injury to a body map, choosing the side and rating how sore it is, then answer questions on what they are training for, the training behind them, the equipment within reach and how many minutes a session can have. Their GP remains the person for anything medical, and where an answer on the health screen calls for that GP's go-ahead first, chest pain being one, the programme is built once the patient lets the app know the GP has agreed.

From those answers, TriageFit builds the programme in phases our coaches designed, choosing from the library's 382 exercises the ones that suit their equipment, their level and the injury, and keeping out the movements that would provoke it. The patient sets the weekday their check-in falls on, and the sessions they logged are already in it when it opens. Seconds after they send it, a written reply on their week comes back, and a real coach reads the check-in.

Sharing is the patient's choice, offered at checkout and again later from settings, and it can be switched off whenever they like. While it is on, a clinician at the practice can see which programme week the patient is in, when they last checked in, their adherence summed up in one number, the injuries and medications they have recorded, and their energy, stress and sleep over the past fortnight, and can print a progress report. The practice never sees their journal, their messages with coaches or the training and food they log each day, and every time someone there opens a patient's record, the access is logged. Under data protection law the practice is a controller for whatever its clinicians view, and TriageMethod Ltd, an Irish company, is controller of the service as a whole.

A physio practice in Waterford

Three physios work at a practice in Waterford, each on their own Premium plan, and patients get their home programmes through the Medbridge Go app. A nurse in their thirties comes in with a sore right knee after taking up running again and, after five sessions, is ready to finish treatment but keen to get stronger before entering another race.

The physio gives them the printed one-pager at the fifth and final session, and the nurse scans its QR code that evening. They mark the right knee on the intake's body map, note that they work long shifts, and say they can train three times a week for forty-five minutes at the gym near the hospital. Their programme takes the knee into account from week one, and they pick Sunday for check-ins, when their week of shifts is behind them.

Five weeks in, split squats leave the knee aching the next morning. The nurse tells the AI coach, which offers a different exercise for that slot and says the knee should go back to the physio if the ache lasts, and the swap goes in once the nurse accepts it. Because they chose to share their progress when they paid, the physio can open the portal and see the nurse's programme week, Sunday's check-in and their adherence figure.

Who pays what in the partnership

The practice pays TriageFit nothing to take part, whether it refers one patient or fifty. The patient's plan is €50 every 4 weeks or €500 a year with VAT included, and they pay it themselves, with every payment 10% lower for the life of the membership because they joined through the practice's link.

Whether a practice may accept a referral fee depends on its professional rules, so the commission stays off unless the practice switches it on in its settings. The switch records the practice's confirmation of two things, that the fee is within those rules and that it will make any disclosure those rules call for. With it on, the practice earns 5% of each payment from a patient it referred, €2.25 on a four-weekly payment and €22.50 on a yearly one. The fee is paid out of TriageFit's side of each payment, and the patient's bill is the same with the commission on or off.

Fees sit for 30 days before they can be paid, a refund or a chargeback cancels the fee on that payment, and Stripe Connect carries the monthly payout once €20 or more has built up. A practice already paying Medbridge renewals takes on no new bill by joining.

Registering the practice

The clinic registration form asks for the practice's name, yours and an email address, and has room for the practice website, your role and how big the team is. Adding the website lets TriageFit verify the practice sooner. There is a box for whoever pointed you our way, and a tick confirming that you can act for the practice and that you accept the clinic partnership terms.

Once the form is sent, the portal exists and the link works, and a patient who uses it gets the discount on their very first payment. A member of the TriageFit team then looks at the practice by hand, confirms it is real and that you have the standing to sign it up, then emails the result. From then on, patients who opt in can let the practice follow their progress. Before signing up, a practice manager can read the data processing agreement for how patient data is handled, and the security page for the safeguards around it.