Developing effectiveness measures of telerehabilitation

The Foundation's program, Health e-Technologies: Assessing New Tools for Chronic Disease Management and Health Behavior Change, was designed to catalyze the development of more efficacious interactive health programs on health behavior change and disease management by evaluating promising interventions and providing information resources and tools for professionals.The purpose of this project is to develop effective measures of telerehabilitation. The grantee will address three areas of need: (1) to date, there are no randomized controlled trials of the clinical effectiveness of telerehabilitation -- trials cannot begin until measures validated for outpatient therapy are validated for telerehabilitation; (2) the costs and benefits of providing telerehabilitation to people facing barriers to outpatient therapy by virtue of disability need to be quantified for people who live in urban and suburban areas -- current cost benefit analyses tend to rely on distance barriers to transportation, rather than building barriers; and (3) rehabilitation facilities need a decision support tool to support financial decision making for providing therapy through outpatient clinics or home health services. The anticipated outcomes are: (1) if it can be shown the measures are valid, the grantee will proceed to a clinical trial next year; (2) the new cost-analysis methodology will raise important national policy issues about the inequity of denying any clinically effective therapy modality (telemedicine) to non-rural patients; and (3) the grantee will make its interactive spreadsheet freely available to all rehabilitation providers to conduct their own financial analyses.

Grant Details

Amount Awarded $40,000.00

Awarded on: 8/22/2003

Time frame: 9/1/2003 - 8/31/2004

Grant Number: 49143