Rehabilitation Measures Database
Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC)
RRTC on Improving Measurement of Medical Rehabilitation Outcomes
Submitted by Jennifer Moore and Jason Raad
Focus
Knowledge translation is promoted by the use of the most appropriate and sensitive data collection instruments. Such use can contribute to more easily determining the clinical translation of research evidence.
Context
A common difficulty for rehabilitation clinicians is the lack of commonality across data collection instruments used in the provision of care. The variation also includes the use of instrumentation for data collection that may not be validated and sensitive to relevant information in a particular clinical case. The use of more consistent, valid, and sensitive instrumentation provides an opportunity to appropriately aggregate data and assess effectiveness leading to the description of evidence-based practices. RRTC staff developed the RMD in collaboration with intended users in order to effectively address and overcome this challenge.
KT Activity
The RRTC engaged in 7 focus groups of 75 medical rehabilitation professionals to provide input in the creation of the RMD. The input provided the basis for the development of the user-friendly, free, web-based, searchable RMD.
The RMD provides instrument summaries that include descriptions of each instrument's psychometric properties and instructions for administering and scoring each assessment. In addition to the instrument summary, the RMD provides a link to the instrument to download if freely available or information about where to obtain the instrument if not.
The RMD is most useful to rehabilitation clinicians if the resources within it are current and up to date. The RRTC developed collaborations with clinicians, professional associations, and universities to thereby ensuring that the RMD database continues to be updated as new standardized instruments become available and updates to the instrument summaries are made. Health science programs use the RMD as part of their curriculum. Students from these programs assist with writing instrument summaries for class credit and ensures that participating students are aware of the RMD once they are in the field and can competently use the database.
Impact
Across the period of 1/1/13 through 8/31/13, the RMD experienced 1,851 page views on average on a daily basis. Approximately 54% of those page views were from first-time viewers from over 150 countries. These data would suggest the RMD may be promoting widespread utilization of standardized instruments relevant to medical rehabilitation clinical care.
Learning
The RMD offers a collection of information summaries and links to instrumentation that is significant in promoting standardization of data collection. Additional evaluative information needs to be collected to understand the extent to which the use of instrumentation selected through use of the RMD eventuates in establishing the foundation for clinical translation of research evidence.
Read more at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24076083
Contact Information
Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago
345 East Superior Street
Chicago, IL 60611
Phone: 1-800-354-REHAB (7342)
Rehabilitation Measures Database: https://www.sralab.org/rehabilitation-measures
Website: http://www.ric.org