Join us for the first installment of a two-part series exploring strategies for teaching acute care content in today’s classroom. In this session, we will highlight the PhysioU Acute Care and Assistive Devices apps and discuss practical ways these resources can help bring the inpatient environment into your teaching.
Acute care presents unique instructional challenges—from complex equipment and safety considerations to preparing students for clinical environments they may have never experienced. Dr. Tracy Moore will demonstrate how PhysioU resources can help bridge this gap by providing clear visual references, structured learning tools, and clinically relevant examples.
We will also explore how content across the broader PhysioU app suite can support teaching and reinforce key concepts related to inpatient care.
Featured Speaker: Tracy Moore, PT, DPT, ONC
Dr. Moore is a physical therapist, faculty member, product manager and educational leader. He completed his Doctorate in Physical Therapy at Azusa Pacific University and later received the Oncology Clinical Specialist certification from the American Board of Physical Therapy Specialties. Following a residency at City of Hope National Medical Center, Dr. Moore began his academic career teaching subjects such as oncology, clinical skills, differential diagnosis, and acute care. He is an active speaker at national and international conferences, specializing in oncology rehabilitation, chronic pain, and learning science. Dr. Moore continues to conduct and publish research, present at industry conferences, and contribute to PhysioU app design and development. His approach uniquely bridges the gap between the student experience, clinical expertise, and learning science in order to help faculty and students revolutionize healthcare education in their own classrooms around the world.
00:00 Acute Care Setting Webinar
01:50 Acute Care Teaching Challenges
05:12 App Navigation and Features Demo
10:00 Hospital Equipment Training Resources
17:05 Assistive Devices Educational Resource Presentation
20:24 Educational Apps Presentation Overview
Helpful Links: Complimentary Educator access | Educator resources | Set up a Demo
Teaching Acute Care Physical Therapy: How We’re Helping Programs Bridge the Gap Between Classroom and Clinic
If you’ve ever taught acute care physical therapy, you know the unique challenge intimately: how do you prepare students for the complexity of an inpatient setting when they have limited access to actual hospitals, real patients, or specialized equipment?
It’s a question we’ve grappled with ourselves. At PhysioU, we’re not just building educational technology – we’re active faculty members who live these challenges daily. Our Director of Product and Education, and Education Lead for PhysioU, Tracy Moore, PT, DPT, ONC, recently led a faculty webinar exploring exactly how we’ve designed our platform to address the most pressing obstacles in acute care education. What emerged was a practical roadmap for programs navigating the post-COVID clinical landscape, where traditional teaching methods have become increasingly difficult to implement.
The Perfect Storm: Why Acute Care Education Has Become More Challenging
The challenges aren’t new, but they’ve intensified. Clinical site access has contracted significantly since COVID-19, making it harder to guarantee every student meaningful exposure to inpatient settings during their didactic education. Even when access exists, the sheer size of many PT programs means hands-on time with specialized equipment gets diluted to the point where some students barely touch a ceiling lift or hospital bed before their clinical rotations begin.
Then there’s the cost factor. Standardized patients are expensive, and while they’re invaluable for certain learning objectives, the budget rarely stretches far enough to simulate the full range of acute care scenarios students need to master. The result? Students often learn by practicing on healthy twenty-something classmates, asking them to imagine being a seventy-five-year-old with COPD, multiple comorbidities, and the lines and tubes that come with acute illness.
There’s also a structural challenge that many programs face: acute care content doesn’t neatly fit into a single course. Elements appear in the dedicated inpatient class, yes, but also in cardiopulmonary, assistive devices, acute neuro sections, and more. Without deliberate coordination, critical content can fall through the cracks or get covered superficially across multiple courses, leaving students with fragmented knowledge when they need integrated clinical reasoning skills.
Building Context: Why Clinical Reasoning Starts With Organization
One insight that shaped our approach to the PhysioU Acute Care app is this: students can’t develop strong clinical reasoning if they don’t have a mental framework for organizing clinical information. When a student encounters a patient with breast cancer in an acute care setting, they need more than textbook knowledge of the disease. They need to quickly recall: Why is this patient here? What precautions apply? What contraindications should I watch for? What assistive devices are appropriate? What lines and tubes am I likely to encounter?
Our Acute Care app structures information exactly this way – by patient population, with context-specific details that mirror how clinicians actually think. Consider the breast cancer population module. Rather than providing an exhaustive oncology reference, it focuses on acute care essentials: common reasons for admission, typical precautions like splinted coughing, strengthening considerations for scapular stabilizers, post-surgical contraindications, and the lines and tubes commonly associated with this population.
This approach reduces the cognitive load students face when they’re already managing the stress of clinical performance. As Tracy explained during the webinar, “We’re really trying to pull things together… the goal with the students is to say, hey, I want you actually to have somewhere to file this stuff when you go to the clinic.”
The platform extends this philosophy across patient populations – COPD, traumatic brain injury, post-operative orthopedic cases, and more. Each one provides just enough clinical context to help students develop pattern recognition and clinical reasoning, rather than overwhelming them with information they’ll need to memorize but may never use.
Equipment Exposure: Solving the Access Problem
Perhaps nothing illustrates the gap between classroom and clinic more starkly than specialized equipment. Many programs have a Hoyer lift, maybe a few hospital beds, perhaps some traction equipment. But a car transfer simulator? A ceiling lift? Multiple models of hospital beds with different control systems? These remain out of reach for most educational programs, either due to cost or space constraints.
We’ve addressed this through comprehensive equipment videos that demonstrate not just what the equipment looks like, but how to use it safely and effectively. Students can watch detailed demonstrations of car transfer simulators, review the specific steps for operating different types of lifts, and familiarize themselves with hospital bed controls before they ever encounter a patient who needs those skills.
The value here isn’t just about exposure – it’s about building confidence and competence before the stakes are high. As Tracy noted, “When the patients are in the bed and they’re in pain, that’s not the time that you want the student to be really getting familiar with how to use the bed controls.” If a patient requires the head of bed maintained at a specific angle due to a ventriculostomy, students need to be fluent with those controls, not fumbling through them.
Each equipment module includes procedural cues in text format for quick reference, detailed video demonstrations, and clinical considerations. And because we know faculty need flexibility, every piece of content can be easily extracted using our Educator Tools – whether you want to embed a video in your LMS, copy a link for your syllabus, or build a slide deck for lab instruction.
From Isolation Precautions to Lines and Tubes: Covering the Essentials
The Acute Care app systematically covers the foundational knowledge students need before stepping into an inpatient setting. Vital signs, of course, but also isolation precautions with detailed demonstrations of donning and doffing PPE. Hand hygiene protocols. The distinctions between standard, contact, droplet, and airborne precautions, with clear guidance on when each applies.
We’ve also fully integrated our Lines and Tubes app into the acute care content, recognizing that these topics shouldn’t exist in isolation. Students learn about chest tubes in cardiopulmonary, wound drains in acute care, central lines in ICU rotations. By embedding this content within the Acute Care app, we make it accessible exactly where students expect to find it, organized by body region for intuitive navigation.
Each line and tube entry includes purpose, placement considerations, and – critically – clinical implications for physical therapy. What should you discuss with nursing before mobilizing a patient with a chest tube? Where should you never place a gait belt? These practical details make the difference between theoretical knowledge and clinical competence.
Functional Training and Video Case Studies: Application in Action
Knowledge acquisition is only half the battle. Students also need to see how everything comes together during actual patient interactions. That’s where our functional training modules and video case studies become invaluable.
The functional training section covers bed mobility, fall recovery, car transfers – all demonstrated with the kind of detail that allows students to visualize themselves performing these skills. The videos show proper body mechanics, cueing strategies, and how to adapt techniques for different patient presentations.
But the video case studies take application to another level. These aren’t scripted demonstrations with actors clearly playing roles. They’re realistic patient encounters that unfold the way actual clinical sessions do – complete with the ambient sounds of a hospital, the verbal exchanges between therapist and patient, and the clinical reasoning decisions that happen in real time.
During the webinar, Tracy demonstrated a total hip replacement case study. The video captures the entire encounter: entering the room, establishing rapport, reviewing precautions, performing bed mobility training, completing a transfer to the chair. Students can watch the full session or skip to specific sections – edge of bed activities, transfers, finishing up – depending on their learning needs.
Each case study includes clinical reasoning questions tied to specific sections of the encounter. Before watching the therapist enter the room, students consider: What should I check before I go in? How will I explain the importance of mobility to this patient? After watching bed mobility, they reflect: Were the cues appropriate? What would I have done differently? This structure transforms passive video watching into active learning, helping students develop the clinical judgment they’ll need when they’re the ones making decisions at bedside.
Making It Work in Your Program: Practical Integration
We’ve designed PhysioU with the reality of faculty workload in mind. The platform integrates seamlessly with any LMS, allowing you to share specific content with a simple link. The Educator Tools let you extract images, videos, or entire pages for slide decks or handouts. The bookmark feature allows you to curate custom collections of content for specific courses, units, or exams – and share those collections with students via a single URL that remains active throughout the semester.
Faculty accounts are free, precisely because we want instructors to explore the platform, understand how it aligns with their curriculum, and strategically deploy it where it adds the most value. We’re not interested in being another expensive resource that students pay for but rarely use. We’re interested in becoming an integrated part of how you teach and how students learn. The platform also aligns explicitly with CAPTE standards and NPTE content outlines, with curricular mapping guides available for each app. This makes it easier to document how you’re addressing specific competencies and to identify any gaps in your current curriculum.
Beyond the Acute Care App: A Connected Ecosystem
While the Acute Care app is comprehensive, it works synergistically with our Assistive Devices app, which many faculty use as a quick-reference tool. After students have learned the fundamentals of walker fitting and gait training with various devices, the Assistive Devices app becomes their go-to resource for quick refreshers: Which side do I stand on for crutch training on stairs? How much elbow flexion for a standard walker? What’s the sequence for ascending stairs with a cane?
The app includes videos for each device and scenario, organized by whether the right or left extremity is affected, and whether the patient is ascending or descending stairs. It covers bed mobility, sit-to-stands, transfers with slide boards, and wheelchair management – all structured for rapid access when students need just-in-time information. This app becomes especially valuable during clinical rotations, when students encounter an assistive device they haven’t used in months or need to confirm a detail before working with a patient.
Looking Ahead: Simulations and Beyond
The acute care content we’ve covered represents just one dimension of how we’re supporting clinical education. A future faculty webinar will explore acute care simulations – interactive scenarios that allow students to make clinical decisions, receive immediate feedback, and experience the consequences of their choices in a safe learning environment.
We’re continuing to expand based on faculty feedback, adding content that addresses emerging needs and refining existing material to make it even more useful. Because we’re faculty ourselves, still teaching in PT programs, we understand that what works in theory doesn’t always work in practice. That real-world testing keeps us honest and focused on solutions that genuinely make your job easier and your students better prepared.
The Bottom Line
Teaching acute care physical therapy in today’s environment requires creativity, resourcefulness, and tools that extend your reach beyond the traditional classroom. You shouldn’t have to choose between giving students comprehensive exposure to acute care concepts and staying within your program’s budget and logistical constraints.
We built PhysioU to bridge that gap – not as a replacement for clinical experience, but as a way to ensure students arrive at their rotations with a solid foundation of knowledge, familiarity with equipment and scenarios they haven’t physically encountered, and the clinical reasoning skills to quickly integrate into the care team.
If you’d like to explore how the platform might work in your specific program, we’d love to chat. Whether it’s a quick one-on-one meeting or a lunch-and-learn with your department, we’re here to help you get the most value from these tools. Because at the end of the day, we’re all working toward the same goal: preparing the next generation of physical therapists to provide excellent patient care from day one.
Ready to explore PhysioU for your program? Faculty accounts are free. Reach out to schedule a conversation about how we can support your acute care curriculum.
