“We were able to find out what those specific gait deficits were, create a targeted approach, and then track that data. OneStep allows us to see subtle changes before anyone else would, and this is going to allow us to reach our goals of being independent and remaining active.”

^{Christen Bliss, Vice President of Clinical Services, Blue Stone Therapy}

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Blue Stone Therapy provides therapy to the residents of its facility partners, and Christen Bliss leads its clinical services. The patients she worries about most are the ones who keep falling after the team has already done everything the protocol says. A fall is an event, not a diagnosis: it tells a therapist something is wrong without saying which thing, so the next plan tends to look like the last one. “I think therapists get stuck,” Christen says. “I’ve done the same thing over and over, and that patient continues to fall.” And between formal reassessments, the only signal that a plan is working is that nobody has fallen yet, which is a late one.

Her team had one such patient, with multiple falls and no clear next step. Instead of another round of the same program, they took a OneStep baseline and read off the specific gait deficits behind the falls. The plan was built around those deficits, using the targeted interventions OneStep suggests for what that patient’s gait is actually showing rather than for a fall-risk category, and the team kept measuring as treatment ran. Within weeks the measurements showed small improvements in the deficits they were treating, well before any reassessment would have, so they knew the plan was working while it was still running instead of waiting to see whether the next fall came. That is now how Blue Stone looks at every frequent faller: name the deficit, treat it, and watch it move.