Software for home-visit physiotherapy gets written about as though it were clinic software with a smaller screen. It is not. The constraints are different enough that a product which is excellent in a clinic can be unusable in a stairwell, and the features that matter most on the road are rarely the ones on the comparison grid.
Four things that are different on the road
- The device is a phone, not a monitor, and often held in one hand while the other carries a bag.
- Half the working day is travel, which nobody pays you for unless you arrange it.
- There is no reception desk. Whatever is not collected at the door is chased in the evening, by you.
- The connection is unreliable. Lifts, basements, thick walls, rural roads, and the flat where the signal dies at the door.
Everything below follows from those four.
Writing a note on a phone
The note written in the room is a good note. The note written at home at nine in the evening is a reconstruction, and it is worse in every way that matters — accuracy, detail, and the fact that it eats your evening.
So the only test that counts is this: write a full follow-up note on your own phone, standing up, one-handed, with someone waiting. Time it. If it takes more than three or four minutes, you will not do it in the room, and every claim the vendor makes about mobile support is irrelevant.
What makes the difference on a small screen is not a phone app. It is the follow-up note starting from the last one, so most sessions are a few edits rather than a blank page; fields for the numbers you track, so a pain score is a tap rather than a sentence; and a record that opens to the last session rather than the top of the file.
What to avoid: products that hide the note behind three navigation layers, forms that lose what you typed when the screen rotates, and any workflow that requires a desktop to finish something you started on a phone.
Travel time, and pricing it honestly
This is the arithmetic that decides whether a mobile practice is viable, and it is the one most often skipped.
Six visits a day with forty minutes of travel between them is four hours of driving. That is not overhead around your working day; it is half your working day. A practice that charges only for the treatment is charging for four hours out of eight.
Three ways to handle it, all legitimate:
- A higher session fee that includes travel, with a radius you will actually cover. Simple to explain, simple to apply.
- A travel charge in distance bands. Fair, transparent, and slightly more work to quote.
- A minimum booking for far addresses. Two sessions, or a longer session, so the drive is worth the day.
Whichever you pick, make it a rule rather than a negotiation. Travel charges decided patient by patient are the fastest route to resenting the far end of your own patch, and patients can tell.
Building a day that is not all driving
Geography beats software here, and the biggest wins are scheduling habits rather than features.
- Book by area, not by preference. North of the river on Tuesdays, south on Thursdays. Patients accept this far more readily than most physiotherapists expect, provided it is presented as how the service runs.
- Put the address in the appointment, not in your head or in a separate contacts app. Two taps to navigate matters six times a day.
- Leave realistic gaps. A diary built on optimistic drive times makes you late from ten in the morning onwards, and lateness compounds across a day in a way it never does in a clinic.
- Keep one recovery slot. Traffic, a session that overruns, a family member with questions at the door. Without it, one delay is the whole afternoon.
Getting paid at the door
In a clinic, unpaid sessions get caught at reception. On the road there is no reception, and an unpaid visit turns into an evening of polite messages.
What works for mobile practice:
- Packages paid in advance. Six or ten sessions up front removes the transaction from every visit and makes the diary predictable. For home visits this is the single biggest improvement available.
- A payment method that works at the door, whatever that is where you work — a card reader, an instant bank transfer, a payment link.
- An overdue list you look at weekly, on a set day. Ten minutes on Friday beats remembering at midnight.
- Receipts sent immediately, from the phone, while you are still outside the door.
Patchy signal, and what to ask about offline
Ask every vendor this directly, and be precise about it: can I write and save a note with no connection, and will it sync when the signal returns?
For most cloud products the honest answer is no. Watch for the answer that sounds like yes and is not: "it is a progressive web app" usually means the app opens without a connection, not that it saves your work.
That is the answer for us as well. Physioly caches enough to open quickly, but saving a note needs a connection. In practice, mobile physiotherapists handle it the same way regardless of vendor: write the note in the flat if there is signal, otherwise in the car before driving off — which is when you remember it best anyway.
Test it on your own phone, on a real round
Three visits, three notes written in the room, one payment recorded at the door. That is the test that decides it.
Create a free account → No credit card. The first 7 days have no limits at all.Lone working, and the record nobody thinks about
Visiting strangers alone deserves more thought than it usually gets, and most of it is habit rather than software.
- Someone knows your day's addresses and rough timings. A shared diary or a message each morning is enough.
- A check-in habit at the last visit of the day.
- A written note of any visit that felt uncomfortable, recorded at the time. If you ever decide to stop seeing that patient, that contemporaneous note is what supports the decision.
- A clear policy on who else may be in the room, agreed before the first visit rather than negotiated at the door.
None of that is a feature to shop for. It is worth writing down once and following, which is more than most mobile practices do.
How Physioly handles a mobile week, honestly
What works well on the road: the clinical record and diary run in a browser on a phone and can be installed to the home screen, follow-up notes start from the previous session, appointments carry the address, packages track sessions used and remaining, payments and overdue amounts are visible in one list, and PDF reports can be produced and sent from the phone.
What is not there, and matters specifically for home visits:
- No offline note-taking. Saving needs a connection.
- No route planning or optimisation. You order the day yourself and navigate in your own maps app.
- No mileage tracking for tax purposes.
- No built-in card payments. You record that a payment happened; taking it is your reader, your bank app or your payment link.
- No native app in the App Store or Play Store — a progressive web app installed to the home screen.
For a mobile physiotherapist who wants records, diary, packages and payment tracking in one place on a phone, that is a reasonable fit, and the free plan costs nothing forever with an unlimited first week. If route planning and mileage are the features you are shopping for, they are not here, and a week testing us would only tell you what this paragraph just did.
Questions we get asked
What software do mobile physiotherapists need?
The same four jobs as any practice — records, diary, money, documents — but weighted differently. Notes have to be writable on a phone in a few minutes, the diary has to carry addresses and travel gaps, and payment has to be collectable at the door rather than chased from a desk later.
Can I write clinical notes on my phone between home visits?
Yes, in any product that is genuinely responsive rather than a desktop screen squeezed onto a small display. Test it properly before you buy: write a full follow-up note on your own phone, one-handed, standing up, and time it. Ten minutes of testing saves a year of writing notes at home in the evening.
How should I charge for travel time on home visits?
Either build it into a higher session fee, add a distance-banded travel charge, or set a minimum booking for far addresses. What does not work is absorbing it silently: an hour of driving is an hour of your working day, and a mobile practice that prices only the treatment ends up working longer for less.
Does physiotherapy software work without an internet connection?
Most cloud products, including Physioly, need a connection to save. Ask every vendor this directly and do not accept "it is a progressive web app" as the answer — that usually means the app opens offline, not that it saves your note. Plan for it: write in the flat with signal, or on the phone before you drive off.
Is Physioly suitable for a physiotherapist who only does home visits?
It works well for records, diary, packages and payment tracking on a phone, and the free plan is free forever with an unlimited first week. What it does not have is route planning, mileage tracking or offline note-taking, so if those are the deciding features you should look elsewhere.