Page 18 - Mobility Management, August/September 2020

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Mark Schmeler: Showing Our Value
presentations simultaneously on the same topic or close topics.
We do have two sessions on the last day, in the morning. People think, “I got stuck on Saturday morning at 8 o’clock.” That’s not the case at all; that’s where it made sense. We do try to put some headliners [on the final day] so people stick around.
MM: Your 2021 theme is Showing Our Value.
Mark Schmeler: In healthcare, Value is the product
of Quality over Cost. The Quality of care divided by the Cost of care equals the Value of the care. Look at those three variables, with Value being the output: If you have a low Cost and high Quality treatment, your Value goes way up. The problem we have is we haven’t been able to define quality. Quality can be a lot of things.
My sister [a gynecological oncologist] was able to convince the World Health Organization that every woman around the world should get a Pap smear because it’s going to reduce mortality and save money.
It can predict cancer in its early stages. The cost of doing this procedure is pennies. So it’s a huge, huge value.
A ROHO cushion costs $400; a foam cushion costs $20. If you’re a payor, you’re only looking at the cost; you’re not looking at the effectiveness of the product. Quality has to be defined in such a way that people understand: The ROHO costs $400, but I’ve reduced pressure sores by 90 percent. That’s where we’re needing to go.
MM: You recently announced a new Master of Rehabilitation Technology (MRT) degree from your Rehabilitation Science and Technology school.
Mark Schmeler: What I’d like to see is the ATP profes- sion becoming a fully vetted healthcare profession with its own curriculum and its own college degree associ- ated with it. We’ve had a master’s degree at Pitt for 25 years, but it was mostly focused on research. I wanted to make this a clinical degree similar to a master’s of occu- pational therapy, a master’s of physical therapy.
You have a bachelor’s degree and you go back to school for two years — in this case, we found a way to squeeze it into one year, and it basically teaches you the fundamentals that it takes to be an ATP. And then you can sit for your ATP board exam when you’ve graduated.
MM: So this master’s degree is a well-defined way of educating the next generation of ATPs?
Mark Schmeler: There are a lot of very bright young people coming out of undergrad school that don’t know about this profession. They think they want to go into physical therapy and OT and speech and PA and med school, which are all great professions. They just don’t know about rehab tech, and it’s a great profession.
We know the field of AT [assistive technology] desper- ately needs ATPs. Can we work together to increase
that pool of candidates by offering scholarships, tuition remuneration, possibly employing them as fellows or co-ops while they’re going to school? It will be online this fall because of COVID, so they can get the training they need in a reasonable amount of time, at a reasonable cost, and move onto what could be a phenomenal career. I think the industry is in a position to support that.
MM: So this is a next step in CRT’s maturation?
Mark Schmeler: Orthotics and prosthetics moved to a master’s degree about 15 years ago. We have an O&P program in our department, and they’ve been a very good model to look at because prior to any college or formal training, you basically became an orthotist or prosthetist [through family connections]. And then slowly, it became a profession with a university curriculum.
The old school will argue that going to college is a
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