As the Chief Medical Officer for World Rugby, Martin Raftery knows a thing or two about getting people up and running (literally) after an injury. Thanks to some world-class software, he’s able to scale that knowledge, putting his expertise into the hands of physiotherapists and injury recovery managers around the country.

Thousands of injured workers will probably never know their recovery is thanks to the same expertise that kept players George Gregan on the rugby field. But FPES, the software-powered business Martin runs with his son, Matthew, is making that possible. It’s an offer that benefits the employee, the employer and the employer’s insurers, who know that the faster an employee returns to work, the less chance there is of a long-term injury claim.

The workplace injuries lead to claims that insurers like to see handled efficiently. The insurers want first-class management of the injury and the return to work plan, but the quality of care around the country varies widely. The question for FPES was how to take Martin’s internationally-recognised expertise and make it accessible not just to the employees’ physiotherapists but to non-medical professionals like store managers.

FPES had tried a few software developers before they came to Innovent.

We found smaller operations would promise the world and deliver nothing like it. Innovent is different. They’re very honest and straight to the point; we have a real rapport. Where other developers just do what you ask them to, Innovent will make suggestions of ways to achieve the same thing but to do it better. Their suggestions have saved us time and money. The savings aren’t just in their development costs but in our costs of business because they’ve suggested more efficient ways for us to do things. And the results are better for our clients, too.

FPES solution involves shipping tablets to physiotherapists to fill out patient reports. The physiotherapists are prompted to consider relevant treatment options, and the client’s specialists are alerted if employees aren’t making progress or hitting milestones.

Reports are available to the client, including store managers who can see how their employees are progressing. Those managers can also prepare return-to-work plans easily because FPES’s software catalogs every physical movement involved in every relevant job in the company. If an employee’s injury means they can’t go back to their old job, the software matches them to alternative roles within their physical capabilities.

Software is so important to our business that we’ve thought about bringing it in-house but we’d only be able to have one developer and Innovent has whole teams. It’s much faster and more cost-effective working with a team, and we know they’ll deliver on time. Timeliness is critical to us because we promise our clients upgrades, so we need to live up to that.”

For FPES it’s also a matter of trust. “We tell Innovent what we need the software to do and they do it, making suggestions that add value but without getting into the nitty-gritty of coding,” says Matthew. “We leave them to work out how to deliver what we want and, having seen results, again and again, we know that’s exactly what will happen.”

That trust in the ability of the software to deliver results for clients has seen FPES expand its operations, applying knowledge won on the world’s rugby pitches to more than 3,000 users in a wide variety of enterprises.