The dosage fields a rehabilitation programme needs to be reportable
Published · 6 min read
A home exercise programme that stores "3 sets of 10" has stored an instruction. A programme that stores sets, repetitions, load, rest between repetitions, rest between sets and hold duration has stored data. The gap between those two is the gap between a PDF you emailed and a report you can run.
What a physiotherapist writes on paper
Ask a therapist to prescribe an exercise and they will give you more than two numbers. They will give you how many sets, how many repetitions, how much weight or band resistance, how long to rest between repetitions, how long to rest between sets, and for a hold, how long the hold lasts.
Those six values are already in use. They are written on paper, in a spreadsheet, or in the back of a notebook. They just rarely survive into a system.
Why two fields is not enough
Three problems appear as soon as you store only sets and reps.
Holds have no repetitions. Trunk stabilisation, Copenhagen endurance and plank variants are counted in time, not movements. In the ACL programme we publish, these appear from day 26 onwards and are written as Series: 4 · 30 s rest with no repetition count at all. A two field schema has to either invent a repetition number or drop the exercise into free text. Both lose the prescription.
Rest is where progression hides. Between day 11 and day 26 of that programme, single leg roller rolling goes from 4 sets of 10 with 30 seconds rest to 4 sets of 12 with 20 seconds rest. Repetitions rose and rest fell. If rest is not a field, half of that progression is invisible, and the session looks only slightly harder than it is.
Load has to be separable from the movement. "Hip flexion with ankle strap" and "hip flexion" are the same movement at different resistance. Storing the resistance in the exercise name means you cannot compare them, cannot report across patients, and end up with a content library full of near duplicates.
The shape that works
exercise
series 4
repetitions 12 (empty for holds)
load 2 kg (or band tension)
restBetweenReps 0 s
restBetweenSets 20 s
repeatDuration 30 s (for holds)Empty fields are correct here. A hold has no repetition count, and a bodyweight exercise has no load. A schema that insists every field is filled produces fiction.
What it buys you later
Once dosage is structured, three questions become queries rather than projects.
Did this patient's prescribed volume actually increase across the programme. Did patients who progressed faster on rest reduction report more pain. Does one department prescribe systematically heavier than another.
None of those can be answered from a document, however well written. All of them are one query away once the numbers are fields.
The honest cost
Structured dosage is more work to author than free text. A clinician composing a template has to fill in six values instead of typing a sentence, and for exercises where the dosage genuinely does not matter, that is friction with no payoff.
The way we handle it is that dosage is optional per entry. Cryotherapy, elevation and lymphatic drainage in the published programme carry no dosage at all, because there is nothing useful to count. The structure is there for the entries where it earns its place, not imposed on every line.
That is the trade off. You accept slower authoring in exchange for a programme you can report on. If nobody is ever going to run that report, free text is the honest choice and you should not pay for structure you will not use.
Where this sits in the system
In Ormeda, dosage is a property of an entry inside a day of a programme template, and the template belongs to the hospital's own content library. The rehabilitation module composes those days; the clinician workspace is where they are prescribed from the encounter.
The published ACL programme shows the result, including both dosage shapes.
Programme content is written and assigned by the treating hospital or clinic. To see the authoring side against your own protocols, request a demo.