Three months after ACL reconstruction, a patient laces up, walks to the end of the driveway, and texts the office: "Can I jog today?" It is a Sunday evening. The surgeon is off, the front desk is closed, and the patient — understandably impatient after a graft, months of physical therapy, and a brace they are finally allowed to leave in the closet — wants an answer before Monday morning turns into another week of guessing.
That single question, "when can I run again," is one of the most common messages an orthopedic sports-medicine practice gets after ACL surgery, and it deserves a real, physician-approved answer rather than a guess or a "call the office" voicemail. PrepQ's answer, written and approved by a board-certified orthopedic surgeon: "Most surgeons and therapists clear jogging at 3 to 4 months, once you have sufficient quad strength and no pain or swelling with lower-impact activity. Running on a straight line precedes cutting and pivoting by several months. Return to full-speed running and agility is typically at 5 to 7 months as part of the progressive return-to-sport protocol."
That answer works because it does three things at once. It gives a real timeframe instead of a vague reassurance. It explains why the timeline is staged — straight-line jogging first, cutting and pivoting later — so the patient understands this is a protocol, not an arbitrary restriction. And it stops short of clearing the patient outright, because that decision still belongs to the surgeon and physical therapist who can see the actual knee, not a chatbot reading a script.
Every PrepQ answer works the same way, whether the question is about running after ACL surgery, showering after meniscus surgery, driving after carpal tunnel release, or whether injections can delay a knee replacement. The answer is written by a physician, reviewed and approved by your practice's own doctors before it ever reaches a patient, and delivered by text and voice, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If a message sounds urgent — new swelling, fever, chest pain, a graft that suddenly feels unstable — PrepQ escalates it to the office or 911 instead of answering it. The system is built to reassure on the routine questions and get out of the way on the ones that need a real clinician.
For an orthopedic or sports-medicine practice, that matters for reasons beyond patient satisfaction. Front-desk and PT staff spend real time each week fielding the same handful of recovery-timeline questions across ACL, meniscus, hip, and knee patients. Every one of those calls answered by PrepQ instead is staff time returned to patients who are actually in the office, and a patient who gets an accurate answer at 9pm on a Sunday instead of an anxious weekend of guessing — which, anecdotally, tends to mean fewer of those "just to be safe" Monday-morning add-on visits.