The Foundation for Physical Therapy has awarded Brown University a $2.5-million, five-year grant for a new center of excellence to spur research in the field. In the Center on Health Services Training and Research (CoHSTAR), Brown, Boston University, and the University of Pittsburgh will train researchers and seed new studies to build the evidence base for physical therapy care and to improve how care is delivered.
“Physical therapists are integral parts of the health care system,” said CoHSTAR director Linda Resnik, a physical therapist, associate professor of health services, policy and practice in the Brown University School of Public Health, and a research career scientist at the Providence VA Medical Center. “Every day there are 750,000 people who see a physical therapist. There’s great clinical research that goes on, but there have been very few physical therapist researchers with the skills to conduct health services research. Because of that we are lacking the kind of evidence that we need to inform improvements in health service delivery and policy.”
The center will focus on three areas of research: rehabilitation outcomes measurement, implementation science and quality assurance, and analysis of large datasets. CoHSTAR’s faculty members will expand the capacity for research in these areas by training, nine postdoctoral students and five to six visiting scientists during its five years of funding. Those programs will begin this summer and fall.
