Symposium

Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System

Brain Injury

Clinical Practice (assessment, diagnosis, treatment, knowledge translation/EBP, implementation science, program development)

Measurement

Applying the Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System across Speech-Language Pathology

Tuesday, November 8, 2022

2:15 PM – 3:30 PM

Presenter(s)

Jarrad H. VanStan, PhD, CCC-SLP

Assistant Professor
MGH Institute of Health Professions
Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Slides
Peter A. Meulenbroek, PhD, CCC-SLP

Assistant Professor
University of Kentucky
LEXINGTON, Kentucky, United States
Nicole Rogus-Pulia, PhD, CCC-SLP

Assistant Professor
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Middleton, Wisconsin, United States
SV

Sofia V. Vallila-Rohter, PhD, CCC-SLP

Associate Professor
MGH Institute of Health Professions
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Jeanne Zanca, MPT, PhD, FACRM

IRB Chair/Assistant Director, Spinal Cord Injury Research
Kessler Foundation
West Orange, New Jersey, United States

The Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System (RTSS) is a conceptual framework and set of procedures for specifying rehabilitation interventions in ways that are expected to improve clinical education, research, and practice. However, the RTSS does not provide methods for standardly identifying specific unique targets and ingredients. Without standardization, it will be difficult to know if terminology variations represent differences across treatments. This symposium will review a new method to standardize RTSS outputs. Then the method will be applied to multiple domains of speech-language pathology: voice, language, cognition, and swallowing disorders. It will conclude with an outlook on future work to develop an exhaustive set of RTSS-based unique ingredients and targets across speech-language pathology, determining their reliability and validity, and discussing their implications for improved clinical education, research, and everyday care.

Learning Objectives:

1. Describe at least 3 reasons why improved specification of rehabilitation interventions is imperative to bridge the gap between research and practice
2. Demonstrate how to determine if two relate patient functions are unique or redundant treatment targets
3. Demonstrate how to determine if two relate clinician actions are unique or redundant treatment ingredients