Physiotherapy platform, two-sided product
Therapist dashboard (web)
A physiotherapist-first platform that keeps the care relationship productive between clinic visits. Evolved from ‘Proctify’, a patients-only college project, into a full two-sided product: I authored the PRD, the research, and the design system, and introduced the therapist-facing half the original never scoped.
Physiotherapy recovery extends far beyond the appointment, yet almost every tool treats it as session-bound.
A physiotherapist sees a patient for forty minutes a week. The other six days and twenty-three hours, the part where recovery actually happens or doesn’t, are invisible to them. Patients go home with a printed sheet of exercises and no way to know whether they’re doing them correctly.
Formi closes that gap from both ends: a practice-management dashboard that gives therapists visibility into what happens at home, and a mobile app that gives patients real-time guidance while they exercise. One connected system, two very different jobs.
India has roughly one physiotherapist for every 25,000 people. Independent practitioners already deliver remote care between visits: but informally, over WhatsApp: unpaid, invisible, and impossible to scale past 10–15 active patients without burning out.
The result is revenue leakage from dropout, no clinical visibility between visits, ad-hoc cash and UPI billing, and progress that’s anecdotal rather than evidenced. Two completely different jobs exist inside one recovery programme, therapists manage it, patients live it, and most tools address only one side.
I built the product around two people whose needs only overlap at one point: the programme itself. Everything else, what they want to see, when they open the app, what a good day looks like, pulls in opposite directions.
“I can prescribe the right programme, but I have no idea if it’s actually happening at home.”
“I do the exercises, but I never know if I’m doing them properly until my next appointment.”
Clustering what both groups told me produced three themes: and the useful finding was that each theme shows up on both sides of the relationship, as the same problem wearing different clothes.
Most health apps acquire patients directly and treat the clinician as a distribution channel. Formi inverts that. The physiotherapist is the primary customer: they build programmes, set prices, and invite patients. The patient’s app is an extension of the therapist’s clinical work, not a separate product competing for the same attention.
That choice set the constraint that shaped every dashboard screen: a therapist should be able to complete their full daily patient review in under ten minutes.
Both products sit on a design system I built from the ground up, shared colour, type, and a 4pt spacing base, so the two-sided product reads as one product rather than two apps that happen to talk to each other. Dense clinical data had to render as calm, scannable views.
The home screen sorts by urgency, not alphabetically. Flagged patients rise to the top, pain spike, form deterioration, missed sessions, then active patients by last session, then upcoming starts.
A banner states the day plainly: X patients need your attention. That single line is what makes a ten-minute daily review possible.
The home screen sorts by urgency, not alphabetically. Flagged patients rise to the top, pain spike, form deterioration, missed sessions, then active patients by last session, then upcoming starts.
A banner states the day plainly: X patients need your attention. That single line is what makes a ten-minute daily review possible.
Everything needed to prepare for a session in one view: health summary and medications on the left, current status on the right, clinical snapshot underneath.
Progress is stated in plain language: Post-Operative Knee Recovery, week 5 of 12, 42% complete. Pain score, form accuracy, joint range and adherence sit together, so the numbers are read as one clinical picture rather than four separate metrics.
Most programmes start as a variation of a previous one, not a blank page. The library shows duration, exercise count, enrolled patients and progress at a glance, with view, edit and duplicate on every card.
Creating from scratch is deliberately the one dashed card in the grid: available, but not the default path.
Programme creation is the therapist’s primary action and the single gate every patient enters through. Exercises are dragged from a clinician-validated library into the session, each with its own sets, reps, hold and rest.
Therapist instructions travel with the exercise, and a patient view preview shows exactly what will appear on the phone, so the therapist never has to guess how their prescription reads at the other end.
Tiered Critical, Moderate and Informational so urgency stays visually distinct. A pain spike carries its own suggested action, “pain increased from 4/10 to 7/10 over the last two sessions”, rather than leaving the therapist to work out what changed.
Missed sessions, form deterioration, instalments due and completion milestones all run through the same tiering. One mental model to learn, not five, and every alert ends in a button rather than a dead end.
The money view replaces cash-and-WhatsApp billing: revenue per clinic hour, package sell-through, instalment tracking and weekly payouts, turning previously unbillable clinical time into tracked revenue.
Completion rate sits in the header row beside revenue, and the treatment funnel states the intent in its own subtitle: completions are the goal, not a drop-off. The commercial metrics and the clinical ones point the same way by construction.
Most tools in this space charge a subscription, either a flat cost to the therapist or a paid app for the patient. Both create the wrong incentive: a therapist pays whether they use it well or not, a patient pays regardless of how recovery is actually going.
Formi takes a different route. Patients pay nothing. Therapists are charged a small platform fee, 8 to 12%, only when they prescribe a programme. No programme, no fee.
That decision shaped the dashboard’s revenue section too. Not a subscription screen, but a live read on programmes prescribed and earnings tied to real usage. And it meant patients get zero friction onboarding, no paywall sitting in the middle of a recovery journey.
The obvious metric for a platform like this is renewals. But optimising for renewals quietly rewards keeping someone in treatment longer than they need to be, which is the opposite of what a good physiotherapist is trying to do.
So the dashboard leads with completion rate instead. A patient finishing their programme and being discharged reads as a win, not as revenue walking out of the door.
It changes what the funnel is for. Early drop-off stops being churn to win back and becomes a clinical risk group to intervene on, which is exactly what the alerts layer already exists to catch.
The work landed as a developer-ready specification, not a mood board. A 23-screen therapist dashboard spanning programme creation, patient monitoring, alerts, scheduling, billing and reporting; a 30-screen patient app carrying someone from a therapist’s code through AI-tracked sessions to discharge. Both are composed from one design system, annotated with states, spacing and interactions.
It began as ‘Proctify’, a patients-only college project. The therapist half, the half that makes it a business rather than an app, wasn’t in the original scope at all.
Two things I’d do differently. I designed the pose-tracking session on reasoning alone; it’s the riskiest surface in the product and the one that most needed a rough prototype in someone’s hands early, not a polished spec late. And I’d instrument completion rate from the first build rather than treating it as a reporting feature: the entire business model rests on that single number, so it should have been the first thing measurable.
0 to 1 design is less about the pixels, and more about deciding what not to build yet.
