Trending Up in Rehab Therapy: 2025 Edition

Just like in every other industry—and every other aspect of life—rehab therapy experiences changes with each new year. One thing, though, never changes: treating patients and working towards their best outcomes. That’s made significantly easier when you understand what factors to take into account.

That’s where industry trends come into play. As things change, with new regulations, new technology, new methodologies, different factors will affect how you approach patient care and how your clinic operates. We’re here to help you understand what those trends are and how they’ll be affecting rehab therapists in 2025.

AI and the Age of Automation

Artificial intelligence (AI) has had a bit of a moment the past few years. As the next big thing in technological advancements, one with the ability to affect nearly every industry, nonetheless, it has made quite the splash. The idea that AI would be revolutionary in how we work has been everywhere, with some promises of incredible capabilities and rapid advancement. Now that the novelty has worn off a bit, the realistic opportunities are becoming clear.

This year, we’ll see a wider adoption of AI that can examine images and medical history and analyze and predict effective treatment plans and potential risk factors. We’ll likely see increased documentation capabilities, from ambient documentation’s ability to transcribe conversations to customized plans, in the coming months. The good news for rehab therapists? This will likely cut down on time spent documenting and focusing on compliance, allowing for more time spent with patients.

The truth is, 2025 is likely to continue to see improvement in accuracy and ability of AI. Large language models (LLMs) are a type of AI that are trained on large sets of data in order to understand and create natural language patterns. These models continue to improve as they’re trained on larger and larger sets of data, meaning better and more accurate documentation abilities.

This isn’t just limited to applications like ambient documentation, either. AI across the board improves with more data input, learning just like we would as we take in more information. Predictive analytics, those powered by massive data sets, continue to improve, continue to generate more accurate risk analyses and treatment plans. All of this will help therapists to compare their own patient data to millions of other data points, allowing a more complete and accurate understanding of the patient’s injury and how to treat it.

There are many exciting possibilities when it comes to AI in 2025—especially if you’re a rehab therapist who would love to be able to spend a little bit more time with your patients and a little bit less time doing documentation—but that doesn’t mean we should move full steam ahead without some precautions. AI is still very new, which means we still need to be aware of how it affects things like the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the associated protections that providers and organizations should offer in accordance with this. Ensuring your patient data is safe is still your top priority, especially with new technology available.

More PTs Are Needed for an Increasing Patient Population

It’s true, the patient population of physical therapists (PTs) is increasing—and not because more people are getting injured. No, the pool of patients who will need physical therapy is increasing in 2025 due to the rising age of the population in the United States. US birth rates have continued to decline, hitting a historic low in the past few years, meaning the average age of the population is older, and thus older Americans represent a larger share of the population.

For years, there have been warnings about the strain an aging population will put on the healthcare system, and in 2025, that strain is finally starting to come to fruition. More patients means more sessions and more treatment hours for therapists, who are often already treating many patients a day and experiencing a time strain due to documentation and compliance needs. This is all complicated by the fact that PT practices and organizations continue to face staffing challenges, leaving fewer PTs to handle more overall patients.

Movement, which can be aided or increased by physical therapy, has been shown to have a positive effect on a number of conditions that disproportionately affect older individuals, including Alzheimer’s disease, arthritis, heart disease, osteoporosis, and stroke. It can also help individuals avoid dangerous falls and counteract frailty that may lead to an increase in injury in older adults.

Physical therapy for seniors should focus on improving movement and mobility. Any licensed physical therapist should be able to accommodate this, but there is also a physical therapy specialty in geriatrics that will likely become more prominent as the US population ages. One of PT’s ten specialties is geriatric physical therapy, focusing on maintaining mobility, independence, and overall quality of life.

These PTs often utilize manual therapy techniques, programs specifically tailored to the daily movement patterns of older adults (compared, say, to the needs of an athlete returning to sport after a lower back injury or the movement patterns of an active 50-year-old after hip replacement), and patient education. Due to the increase in demand, this specialty is expected to grow, though it may take some time to catch up to the increase in the average age of the population.

Multidisciplinary Teams Make Waves

As we learn more about how to best treat patients across the spectrum of healthcare, multidisciplinary teams become more important than ever. Once upon a time, it was common for a cancer patient to simply see an oncologist for care. Now, that patient may have an oncologist for regular treatment, a surgical team, a nutritionist, or more to treat from a more holistic view of the patient. This is coming to rehab therapy, as well. Therapists based in acute care and hospitals may already see this team mentality at play in surgical rehabilitation patients.

Practicing in a vacuum, without knowledge of any other care or treatment the patient may be undergoing, is no longer a feasible method of patient care. With the growing popularity of value-based care reimbursement, it’s more important than ever to focus on the best possible outcomes for patients. For patients who manage multiple chronic concerns (polychronic patients are those that have three or more chronic conditions) or those that work through a single diagnosis requiring treatment from multiple specialists, it can be incredibly difficult to find high-quality care across the board. These patients often need to advocate for themselves on multiple fronts, coordinate treatment and prescriptions between multiple providers, and manage the stress of both their condition(s) and taking a leading role in their own care.

The population of polychronic patients, much like the over 65 population in the US, is expected to triple from 2015 to 2030. That means not just more physical therapists treating these patients, but more interdisciplinary teams managing treatment as well.

Technology can also make a big difference in the treatment of patients requiring care from multiple providers. Interoperability can go a long way in alleviating some of this strain. In short, interoperability means that electronic health records (EHRs) and electronic medical records (EMRs) can be a helpful tool here, allowing for records to quickly and easily be viewed by multiple practitioners. With health information shared seamlessly between providers, multidisciplinary teams are better able to perform their function in conjunction with each other.

Physical therapists will have a major role to play on these multidisciplinary teams, given your extensive experience in treating movement-related conditions and PT’s crucial role in patient outcomes and thus value-based care payment models. With payment in these models typically being delivered by episode and split amongst the participating providers, physical therapists are uniquely suited to determine cost-effective treatment methods for many conditions. Tighter collaboration between specialties means some patients may be able to avoid costly surgeries or follow-up complications with the expertise of physical therapists.

2025 will see more patients looking for care from multiple practitioners, so what can you do? It’s a good time to start getting to know other providers in your area that you may work closely with in the future. Having a standing relationship with other practitioners will likely make patient care easier to execute.

Learn how to be proactive: you know that physical therapy can do more than just help patient recover from injury or surgery. Look for places where PT might be useful in preventing a condition from worsening or help the patient be more independent in their everyday life.

Rehab Therapy Trends Will Help You Succeed in 2025

Trends can guide how you practice, the types of treatments you may use, the technology that’s available to you, and more every year. 2025 is no different, and the trends we see now may shift through the year as new factors come into play. It’s important to know what’s coming and stay on top of these industry shifts—which is where Net Health’s Trends Hub comes in. Based on expert input and industry data, you can find more detail about these trends and more on the Trends Hub. It will continue to be updated as the year goes on, so you’re never behind on what’s going on in rehab therapy.