The Best Physical Therapy Online CEUs and HEP Builder – MedBridge Education
Online physical therapy CEU courses are an absolute game-changer for PTs in general, but especially for traveling physical therapists.
As travelers, you move all over the country. You usually don’t know where you’ll be next month, let alone several months in the future. This makes it difficult to plan ahead and attend in-person continuing education courses. And what are the chances the courses offered in your contract area are courses you actually want to take?
I remember feeling stressed about keeping up with and keeping track of all my CEU courses when I first started my travel PT journey. I had several licenses to maintain and they all had different requirements. But I was lucky enough to get a free Medbridge Education membership through my clinic during my first contract.
Ever since that first contract in 2018, I’ve paid for a yearly membership.
It’s the unlimited online physical therapy CEUs and extremely versatile HEP builder for me.
All of these MedBridge features have saved me so much time, money, and effort over the last three years. And they’re all included for one yearly membership fee.
I’m going to cover each of the features offered with a MedBridge subscription throughout this blog to tell you why I can no longer live without it.
Sections
Buy a MedBridge subscription – Save $175 with promo code “skipandjazz” at checkout
What is MedBridge?
MedBridge is a platform designed to educate and improve outcomes for physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech-language pathologists, nurses, and athletic trainers.
MedBridge provides many features in addition to unlimited online continuing education for physical therapists, including live webinars, a home exercise program builder, a patient education platform, certification prep programs (for the OCS, NCS, SCS, GCS, PCS, and CHT), and so much more.
And you get all of this with a single yearly subscription.
Why MedBridge is perfect for travel therapists
MedBridge is the ideal scenario for travel physcial therapists because their CEU courses are 100% online.
You don’t worry about tracking down CEU courses in your contract region in the short three months you’re there. I know you’re saving those weekends for new adventures, anyway!
There’s even a mobile app so you can access CEU courses anytime, anywhere. It makes learning on the road incredibly easy.
You can listen to courses during patient cancellations, on long commutes, or during weekend road trips. I just finished a CEU course the other day while waiting for my dentist to take me back. It doesn’t get much more convenient than that.
It’s also incredibly convenient to have all your home exercises and educational handouts in one place and stored digitally. I know you don’t have anymore room in that trunk for bulky binders!
And if you’re one that spends so much time adventuring that you’re usually scrambling to get all your CEUs at the end of the year, Medbridge is perfect for you. Knock them all out with way less stress and less planning – all from the comfort of your own couch.
What does a Medbridge subscription include?
You have two subscription options with MedBridge: The “Education” Subscription or the “Premium” Subscription.
The cheaper of the two is the Education Subscription, which includes the CEU courses & live webinars, certification prep programs, and the clinician mobile app.
The Premium Subscription is $50 more but includes all the features listed above plus the home exercise builder and patient education platform, and patient mobile app.
Check out a breakdown of each feature below (click to jump to section):
Unlimited Online Physical Therapy CEU Courses
Medbridge’s continuing education courses are no joke. I’ve learned about a huge variety of topics over the last three years, and I can confidently say it’s the best source for online physical therapy CEUs that I’ve found. It’s nothing like the free physical therapy CEUs you can find online. I gave those a chance, but found most of them to be low quality.
I’ve taken value-packed courses on MedBridge with topics ranging from pain neuroscience to dysfunctional breathing to ethics (many states require these courses) to the the importance of sleep hygiene instruction to PT telehealth.
And their courses are delivered by experts in their respective field. My personal favorite has been the therapeutic pain neuroscience series taught by renowned pain expert, Adriaan Louw.
What’s even better is that you can earn your CEUs from the comfort of your own couch instead of sitting through brutally long CEU courses in a freezing patient gym or driving hours and hours just to catch a weekend course.
Earning CEUs through MedBridge is simple:
Consume the lesson. Now’s a good time to mention that you can increase the speed of the presentation to 1.5 - 2x speed if the instructor is talking painfully slow. Wish I could have done that in PT school! Ha!
Take low-pressure quizzes. The quizzes are given throughout the course after each module, which is nice because the info is fresh. Most courses even allow retakes if you score low.
Complete a short survey. This is required to obtain your certificate.
Print your PDF certificate and consider those CEUs done. Once you complete the course/survey you can print or save your certificate immediately.
Desktop view of the CEU learning platform on Medbridge. Lecturer/video on one side and powerpoint on the other. You can choose between several views.
Take CEUs that are directly applicable to your current or upcoming travel contract
MedBridge has CEU courses for every setting. As a travel physical therapist, you can brush up on a setting you haven’t worked in for a while. Or learn all about a setting or patient population you’ve never worked in before.
I’ve been able to brush up on body regions I don’t feel as confident about during outpatient contracts and brush up on stroke interventions while working an inpatient rehab contract.
You can easily browse for courses based on setting, specialty, or body region, and then bookmark courses you’d like to take later on.
Click the links below to get an idea of what kinds of courses Medbridge offers for each profession. I’ve also include the number of courses currently offered on MedBridge – and they’re always adding more.
Online Physical Therapy CEU Courses – 1,200+ Courses
Online Occupational Therapy CEU Courses – 1,000+ Courses
Online Speech-Language Pathology CEU Courses – 600+ Courses
Online Nursing CEU Courses – 500+ Courses
Online Athletic Training CEU Courses – 450+ Courses
Make yourself more marketable with Medbridge CEUs
With MedBridge, you have the ability to make yourself marketable very quickly with unlimited access to physical therapy CEUs online in all settings.
We’ve seen the delicacy of the travel market in recent years, first with PDPM/PDGM changes and most recently due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thankfully, the market has rebounded and is now hotter than ever.
But if the market crashes again or if you want a chance to land a competitive contract, you can take CEUs in that particular setting to help yourself stand out.
I have a travel PT friend who used this series of OASIS courses to sell himself for his first home health travel contract. He had zero prior home health experience, but he was able to leverage his newfound the CEUs he’d taken to ace the interview and get the job.
Digital CEU tracking
You can easily track which courses you’ve taken and how many CEU units you have with the built-in tracker. Even if you’ve taken CEU courses outside of Medbridge, you have the ability to enter them in so they’re all in one place.
Once you’ve taken a course, you can easily generate an individual PDF certificate for each course and for each state you’re licensed in. Once I’ve completed a course, I export these PDFs to a Google Drive folder immediately so all my CEU info is accessible in one place.
Accreditation checker
One of my favorite features is that you can easily check which MedBridge courses are approved for CEUs in which states with their accreditation checker. Once you find a course you’re interested in, enter the state and your profession and it’ll tell you if it’s approved in that state, plus how many hours it’s approved for.
For travel therapists who are licensed in multiple states, this is a huge deal. I’m currently licensed in Kansas, California, Oregon, Colorado, and Texas, and I can easily check whether a CEU course I’m interested in fulfills each of my licenses with the click of a button. If I’m debating between a couple of courses, I’ll choose the one that is accepted in all states I’m licensed in.
MedBridge’s accreditation checker makes it easy to check which CEUs are approved for your state licenses before you take a course.
Live online physical therapy CEUs via webinars
Some states require live CEU courses for license renewal. This makes the idea of online CEUs seem less appealing at first glance, but many of these states allow virtual webinars to count as live CEUs. Check with your specific state for details.
Medbridge allows you to earn live online physical therapy CEUs from the comfort of your own home through online webinars. Check out this schedule to see which webinars are offered the next couple of months.
Certificate programs
Medbridge also offers certificate programs that allow you to improve your expertise in a topic such as telehealth, spinal cord injury, dementia, endurance athletes, or vestibular rehab.
They are essentially collections of their CEU courses provided in a systematic fashion to improve your expertise in a specific patient population. These certificate programs are yet another way you could leverage your recent CEUs to make you more competitive for a contract.
Home Exercise Program Builder
Medbridge’s home exercise program builder is by far the cleanest, most intuitive, and most organized HEP builder I’ve ever used.
And with over 6,500+ exercises (and they’re always adding more) in their system, you’ll be able to find what you need no matter your setting/patient population. I’ve used their HEP builder in outpatient, inpatient rehab, and acute care settings. As a bonus, 2,000+ of the most popular exercises can be easily translated into Spanish with the click of a button.
I’ve also worked with a new electronic medical record (EMR) during each of my travel PT contracts and MedBridge has been easy to integrate with each of them. And it’s been way easier using the same HEP builder at each contract rather than switching to a new platform every time I start a new job.
Creating a home exercise program in MedBridge
Using MedBridge’s HEP builder is as easy as this (refer to image 1 below for reference):
Search for an exercise in one of two ways:
Use the search bar to search for an exercise, e.g. clams, squats, monster walks
Filter exercises by joint, movement, purpose, position, equipment, specialty, muscles, or pathology
Add the exercise to the program with the “+” sign, and it will move to the right of the screen into the patient’s HEP.
Rinse & repeat steps 1-2 to add any other exercises you want to include.
Edit sets/reps/hold time and change the daily/weekly frequency. You can also edit any specific instructions for the exercise by clicking the name of the exercise.
Once HEP is finalized, email, text, or print the program for your patient.
Click “document” to generate the HEP program into a text-only form that you can easily copy and paste into your EMR for your records. It will also generate an access code unique to this patient. Now, you can copy/paste that access code into the MedBridge site during future sessions to easily keep track of your patient’s HEP progression. Refer to image 2 below to see what I mean.
Image 1. MedBridge’s HEP builder is easy to use and includes everything you need to build the HEP on one screen.
Image 2. This is what you can copy and paste into your EMR to 1. document the patient’s HEP as you go and 2. easily pull up and edit the patient’s HEP as your plan of care progresses with their unique access code.
Use favorites and templates to increase efficiency
Once you notice yourself using an exercise a lot, favorite it (click the heart icon). You can search within your favorite exercises later on so they’re easier to find vs. searching the entire exercise library.
You can also choose from MedBridge’s built-in templates for conditions ranging from THA to plantar fasciitis to meniscal lesions to functional stabilization exercises for low back pain
Or you can easily build your own templates or modify their templates to fit your needs within the HEP builder. All you have to do is select the template, and then it will export the template exercises into the builder. Then you can easily edit the program to customize it for your specific patient.
Patient Education Platform
The HEP builder integrates incredibly easily with educational handouts from the patient education platform.
Within the HEP builder, you search for keywords (e.g. low back pain) or filter for specific categories such as ADLs, fall prevention, mobility, surgical precautions and select educational handouts from there. Then you click the + sign to add it to the patient program just like you did with the HEP exercises.
You can easily combine the HEP exercises and educational handouts, then give them to your patient all together so it’s all easily accessible in one place.
A glimpse of MedBridge’s patient education library. You can use the search bar or use the filter system using the menu on the left.
You can easily combine HEP exercises and patient education handouts in the HEP builder so everything is in one place.
To get a better idea of how the MedBridge HEP builder and patient education platform function, click here for video tutorials.
MedBridge Mobile App for Clinicians & Patients
Medbridge’s clinician mobile app and MedBridge GO patient mobile app are thoughtfully designed and easy to use.
It’s 2021 – so many people struggle to keep track of a piece of paper nowadays.
I’ve used the patient app a ton during my outpatient contracts, because you know your patients always have their cell phone on them.
You can send a digital copy of the home program to your patient via text or email. Then they can access the program through the app or a web browser and view pictures and videos to remind them how to correctly perform exercises. Medbridge makes it easy for patients to perform their program properly and safely at home. Their programs include detailed exercise instructions, pictures, and videos of each exercise.
So many of my patients have told me the digital HEP program is extremely helpful. We are throwing so much information at patients when they’re in the clinic that they can’t remember all the little details of an exercise – especially with a busy life of their own.
Using MedBridge has increased compliance for my patients because it’s so easy to use and you just can’t make up an excuse for not accessing it when you have a digital copy.
Certification Prep Programs
A Medbridge subscription also includes certification prep programs that can help you earn specialist certifications.
This is a double whammy for you as a therapist because you’ll be earning all the CEUs you need for your next license renewal while you’re prepping for the big test.
Click the link to learn more about the prep programs below.
Prep Programs for Physical Therapists
Prep Programs for Occupational Therapists
Prep Programs for Nurses
Orthopedic exam tests, manual therapy techniques, and microlearnings
Medbridge also offers a comprehensive list of objective tests and manual therapy techniques sorted by body region.
This is a nice feature when you’d like to quickly brush up on tests or techniques of a body region you haven’t treated in a while without breaking out a textbook.
These features include example videos, notes on clinician and patient position, and evidence available for each test/technique.
The microlearnings feature is designed specifically for clinicians to learn and develop skills during short periods of time (e.g. during a patient cancellation). You can quickly brush up on functional assessments, learn about HEP best practices, and even improve your soft skills.
How much does MedBridge cost?
If you’re looking for cheap physical therapy CEUs online (not to mention unlimited) that are still quality, you’ve come to the right place. I know you’re trying to save money for your next big flight, ski trip or trip abroad.
And that’s why I’m so stoked to now be partnering with MedBridge to help you save time, effort, and money, just as it has for me!
Use the promo code "skipandjazz" at checkout or click this link to save $175 on your yearly MedBridge Education membership.
Here are the discounted rates broken down by specialty:
Physical Therapists and Physical Therapist Assistants – Education Plan $200 annually, Premium Plan $250 annually
Occupational Therapists & Certified Occupational Therapist Assistants – Education Plan $200 annually, Premium Plan $250 annually
Speech-Language Pathologists – Education Plan $95 annually, Premium Plan $145 annually
Nurses – Education Plan $200 annually, Premium Plan Coming Soon
Athletic Trainers – Education Plan $200 annually, Premium Plan $250 annually
Crazy low prices for unlimited CEUs, yeah?! You might spend that much a single weekend CEU course, but not for unlimited CEUs and a fantastic HEP builder. This is a no-brainer.
Buy a MedBridge subscription
I’ve been excited about MedBridge for a long time now, so it’s just the icing on the cake that I now get to partner with a product that I full-heartedly believe in.
I’ve recommended my coworkers for years, and many of them end up subscribing after they see how much of a game-changer it truly is.
So, are you ready to send it, level up your CEU game and make your life easier with a stellar HEP & patient education builder?
After you see how much time, effort, and money MedBridge saves you, you won’t regret it.
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