About My Knee Guide®
Here to Help — From the First Question to Full Recovery
A knee replacement is one of the most significant decisions a patient will ever make. The questions that come with it are serious ones: about the surgery itself, about what to expect, about how to prepare, and about what recovery really looks like. My Knee Guide® was built to answer every one of them.
My Knee Guide is a free, physician-created patient education platform. Everything here was written by an orthopaedic surgeon who performs these procedures and understands not just the medicine, but the uncertainty and the questions that keep patients up at night. It has been free since the day it launched in 2012, and it always will be.
The Learning Center
The My Knee Guide website is a dedicated learning center covering every phase of the knee replacement journey. Whether you are just beginning to explore your options or preparing for surgery next week, the content is here for you:
- The Knee — anatomy, arthritis, surgical options, alignment techniques, and knee prosthesis design
- X-Ray Vision — animated real patient x-rays illustrating six cases progressing from knee arthritis through replacement surgery
- Pre-Op — how to prepare for surgery and what to expect
- Surgery — a clear picture of what happens in the operating room
- Post-Op — recovery, including the home exercise program
- Checklists — practical tools to keep you organized at every stage
- Non-Operative — treatment options to consider before surgery becomes necessary
A dedicated section covers acetaminophen safety for patients managing post-operative pain, developed in partnership with the Acetaminophen Awareness Coalition's Know Your Dose campaign.
As My Knee Guide evolves, the website will deepen its focus on the learning center, expanding the depth and breadth of content available to patients at every stage of their journey.
The My Knee Guide App
For patients who want to manage their entire knee replacement journey in one place, the free My Knee Guide iPhone app brings together the full platform. It includes everything in the learning center, plus the complete interactive experience designed to travel with you:
- A personalized surgery timeline that generates a customizable event schedule based on your surgery dates, with push notifications and email alerts for timely reminders and safety information
- A My Surgery section for tracking your individual journey
- A resource finder covering hospitals, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, home health services, and medical suppliers, with survey data and safety information from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
- A customizable contacts section that syncs with your iPhone calendar
- A Stories section where patients share their own knee replacement experiences
The website is where the education lives. The app is where the journey comes together.
Who Created My Knee Guide
My Knee Guide was created by Dr. Brian R. Hatten, MD, a board-certified orthopaedic surgeon practicing in Daytona Beach, Florida. Dr. Hatten began building the platform in January 2012, writing every piece of medical content, creating custom x-ray animations for six real patient cases, producing educational videos, and designing graphics, all while maintaining his full-time surgical practice.
He built My Knee Guide because he believed patients facing a knee replacement deserved the same quality of information he would give a member of his own family: comprehensive, honest, and coming from a surgeon who is accountable for every word.
Dr. Hatten is a Fellow of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and the American Association of Hip and Knee Surgeons, and serves on the Johnson & Johnson MedTech Kinematic Alignment Advisory Board.
Independently Recognized
Since its creation, My Knee Guide has been independently cited, evaluated, or utilized in nine peer-reviewed studies and clinical reviews conducted by researchers and clinicians across four continents. None of these studies were solicited, funded, or influenced by My Knee Guide or Dr. Hatten.
Among the key findings:
- An NIH-funded randomized controlled trial at the University of South Carolina and Northwestern University selected My Knee Guide as the standard-of-care control group, the clinical baseline for patient education in knee replacement surgery against which new interventions are measured.
- A systematic quality assessment by Bournemouth University's Orthopaedic Research Institute screened 2,613 smartphone apps and ranked My Knee Guide #1 of 15 evaluated platforms using the validated Mobile App Rating Scale (MARS), with the highest overall quality score (4.23/5.0), highest engagement score (4.80/5.0), and top performance across all four subscales.
- Clinicians at the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic in Los Angeles, specialists in treating elite athletes, featured My Knee Guide as clinical guidance in the American Journal of Sports Medicine.
- A government-supported health evaluation service in New Zealand, operating under a review framework used across 70% of NHS sites in England, conducted a structured clinical assessment and awarded a four-star rating.
Additional independent studies come from researchers at the University Hospital Galway, Fiona Stanley Hospital in Australia, Paracelsus Medical University in Austria, Bielefeld University in Germany, and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.
HONcode Certification
My Knee Guide earned and maintained HONcode certification from the Health On the Net Foundation beginning in 2014. HON was a Swiss non-profit organization founded in 1995 with UN ECOSOC accreditation and a formal relationship with the World Health Organization. It was the oldest and most widely used ethical standard for medical and health information on the internet.
HONcode certification required annual review against eight principles governing authority, transparency, financial disclosure, privacy, and advertising policy. My Knee Guide maintained this certification throughout the full operational life of the Health On the Net Foundation, which permanently discontinued on December 15, 2022.
Our Commitment to You
Patients come to My Knee Guide at one of the more uncertain moments of their lives. The commitment here is simple: give them the best possible information, keep it current, and make sure it is always accessible to anyone who needs it, free and without barriers, for as long as this resource exists.
