Page 16 - Mobility Management, June 2018

CRT Trends: Big Data
Quality Assurance & the FMA Assessment
“This report is not yet research,” he said. “This is quality-assurance work. VGM has members who are businesses, and they need quality-assurance metrics to be certified, just like Uber drivers need a rating. Quality- assurance metrics are part of society and part of what we do.
“What industries then do is take everybody’s data, aggregate it, and send it to a university or a company like the RAND Corp. to do scientific analysis. That’s research. Right now, the research is being done, but this is just quality assurance.”
Also on the “what’s next” task list is getting more CRT professionals to collect and share their information.
“Greg and I are really trying to motivate people to give us data,” Schmeler said. “If we can start sharing some
of these quality-assurance outcomes — when we’re working with suppliers and clinicians, my experience has been that they don’t want to measure outcomes. It’s a chore, like having to make your bed in the morning. But once you start to see the value of these graphs, that really is motivating. Like Wow, I really do good work. I want to know more now. I want you to analyze this versus that. Well, we need larger data to do that.”
U.S. Rehab members have supplied data for years, and participating providers receive quarterly reports of their data. Packer said the data is “de-identified,” with client and provider names removed before the University of Pittsburgh receives it to analyze. FMA scores are then used to determine which clients need closer follow-up.
“We contact the patient, on average, five times in the first year,” Packer said. “We also have a mechanism in place that if their score drops by a certain percentage, we’re contacting the clinician as well as the provider to reassess the issue. We make sure there has been patient contact by the provider to make an equipment adjust- ment or to change out a cushion or whatever needs to be taken care of. Once that’s done, we put [the client] back into the system for the next call.”
If the client’s FMA score increases the next time, then that client is considered back on track. But if a client has issues three times within the first year of having his or her wheelchair, “we’re going to contact them more frequently in the second year than we would for a patient whose FMA scores have all been fine.”
“This is also different from a research study in that this
is a business model,” Schmeler said. “It’s modeled after the Functional Independence Measure, which is another tool that’s used in rehab — not rehab tech, but in
regular rehabilitation, where all patients get a Functional
An equal distribution of males and females represents a sample of the population. The average age of the sample is 59 years (SD = 17). Age was normally distrib- uted with a skewness of 0.43 (SE=0.07) and kurtosis of 0.45 (SE=0.14). A breakdown of the top 10 diagnoses represents the most common diagnoses within the sample. Courtesy U.S. Rehab and the University of Pittsburgh.
Independence Measure score at different periods of time through their rehab treatment.”
He compared the FMA to another common healthcare device that measures.
“Think of this tool as a bathroom scale,” he said. “That’s all it is. It’s telling you how much you weigh. You can weigh yourself every day, you can put yourself on a diet and weigh yourself again. And that’s all this is doing.”
In Mobility Management July: More FMA results, including the impact an ATP can have on client success and steps to get started. For more info on the FMA, go to www.FMA.USRehab.com or contact Mark Schmeler
at schmeler@pitt.edu or Greg Packer at greg.packer@ usrehab.com. m
16 JUNE2018|MOBILITYMANAGEMENT
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