Toward a taxonomy of rehabilitation interventions: using an inductive approach to examine the “black box” of rehabilitation1☆
Presented in part at the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine’s annual assembly, October 5, 2002, Philadelphia, PA.
Abstract
DeJong G, Horn SD, Gassaway JA, Slavin MD, Dijkers MP. Toward a taxonomy of rehabilitation interventions: using an inductive approach to examine the “black box” of rehabilitation. Arch Phys Med Rehabil 2004;85:678–86.
A barrier in outcomes and effectiveness research is the ability to characterize the interventions under review. This has been the case especially in rehabilitation in which interventions are commonly multidisciplinary, customized to the patient, and lack standardization in definition and measurement. This commentary describes how investigators and clinicians, working together, in a major multisite stroke rehabilitation outcome study were able to define and characterize diverse stroke rehabilitation interventions in a comprehensive, yet parsimonious, fashion and thus capture what actually transpires in a hospital-based stroke rehabilitation program. We consider the implications of the study’s classification system for a more comprehensive taxonomy of rehabilitation interventions and the potential utility of such a taxonomy in operationalizing practice standards, medical record keeping, and rehabilitation research.
aBrooks Center for Rehabilitation Studies and Department of Health Services Administration, College of Public Health & Health Professions, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
bInstitute for Clinical Outcomes Research, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
cDepartment of Medical Informatics, University of Utah, School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
dCenter for Rehabilitation Effectiveness, Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
eDepartment of Rehabilitation Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA
Reprint requests to Gerben DeJong, PhD, Brooks Center for Rehabilitation Studies, University of Florida, College of Public Health & Health Professions, PO Box 100185, Gainesville, FL 32610-0185 USA
☆ Supported by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (grant no. H133B990005) and the US Army & Materiel Command (cooperative agreement award no. DAMD17-02-2-0032). The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this article are those of the authors and should not be construed as an official US Department of the Army position, policy, or decision unless so designated by other documentation.
1 No commercial party having a direct financial interest in the results of the research supporting this article has or will confer a benefit upon the author(s) or upon any organization with which the author(s) is/are associated.
2 This work was initiated while DeJong was affiliated with the Center for Health & Disability Research and the Neuroscience Research Center, National Rehabilitation Hospital, Washington, DC and Prague, Czech Republic.
ABSTRACT