Hinge Health’s Karen Stander on pelvic floor health

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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Karen Stander, VP of physical therapy and women’s health at Hinge Health, a digital physical therapy clinic. Stander discussed how digital physical therapy can help make pelvic floor treatment more accessible for busy patients or patients living in rural areas.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why is providing women’s pelvic health treatment important?

I love to joke that your pelvic floor is like the best friend you never knew was supporting you until you lose it. One in four women actually suffer from pelvic health disorders. Even if you’ve never had a baby before, as you age the pelvic floor, just like any other muscle group, loses some of its strength or just doesn’t work in the same ways as when you were younger, so it impacts women of all ages.

Hinge Health’s women’s health program pairs you with a specifically trained pelvic health therapist. Less than 7% of physical therapists (PTs) have this specialty. If you think about women, especially in rural areas or nonurban areas, it’s much, much harder to find access to these specialists. It might take an average of six or seven years for someone to actually get to a pelvic health therapist, or when you think about rural members overall, they had to travel more time and many more miles to get access to it.

What’s the best change you’ve made or seen at a place where you’ve worked?

Relating to the women’s health program, it’s really, I think, such a privilege to be able to go through something personally with your own health and see that reflected in a programming service. I was newly pregnant with my second child when I joined Hinge Health, and shortly after we started developing and launching the women’s health program, I was able to utilize our program.

As a busy mom of two, I had no idea how I was going to get out of the house, find parking, find someone to babysit my girl, and get to an appointment. That’s the reality of a lot of new moms. Having access to really high-quality care—digitally, at home, and when I want it—was really kind of mind-changing and life-changing for me and so many other women who have different challenges in their lives.

What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?

I’m surprised when people assume that digital health providers—the clinicians—are somehow second-rate or the care is not effective, and I have not found that to be true. So we’re able to do a lot of what you can do in person just in a different creative way, and I think that blows people’s minds when they receive that care as a patient but also on the clinician side, too.

The telehealth visit is one part of it. The other part of it is our broader digital tool. We do have amazing sensor technology and computer vision to track motion, so that when our members are doing the exercises, we can give them real-time feedback and say, “Oh, the angle of your arm needs to be like this, or turn this, or squat deeper.”