FiRST and Foremost

Abstract

The 2006 House of Delegates of the American Physical Therapy Association passed RC23-06, which mandated: That the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) convene a Summit in or by 2010 with annual reports to the House of Delegates that shall focus on how physical therapists can meet current, evolving, and future societal health care needs. The consideration of innovative process, technology, or practice models by this Summit on Physical Therapy and Society shall not be constrained by existing law, regulation, education, or reimbursement policy. Summit participants shall include but not be limited to leaders within: physical therapy, health policy, public policy, academia, engineering, bioscience, theology, and information technology.1 This task was undertaken by a steering committee that first gathered in the fall of 2007, at which time a plan was set in motion to institute a Physical Therapy and Society Summit by the spring of 2009 with a subsequent report to the House of Delegates in June of that year. For the next 14 months, the committee worked diligently to convene an interdisciplinary group of rehabilitationists, including physical therapy clinicians, educators, and scientists, as well as engineers, ethicists, health care policy makers, physician specialists, federal and private research organizations, and consumers. The Physical Therapy and Society Summit meeting, held on February 27 to 28, 2009, represented a dynamic and creative interaction from which many recommendations emerged.2 All recommendations were included in a report to the 2009 House of Delegates, which voted unanimously to accept its contents. There were several suggestions that captured the attention of steering committee members, including the following: Collaborate to develop and provide leadership in testing and applications of new technologies and approaches that optimize health care delivery. Revisit the interface among practice, education, research, AND technological advances. Create mechanisms allowing all physical therapists to become familiar and stay contemporary with real and virtual technologies. Promote the translation and integration of technology and science and foster collaborations with engineering, industry, and others. While a history of these and other recommendations has been documented,3 the experience inspired us to further purse dissemination efforts at educational leadership and component meetings. Last year, we proposed to convene knowledgeable academic and clinical physical therapists, as well as colleagues from several other scientific and technological environments, to begin configuring informational resources governing genomics, regenerative rehabilitation, biotechnology (virtual environments and robotics), and telehealth. The intention was to generate a rapidly expanding knowledge base that could be shared with the entire American Physical Therapy Association membership and expressed in progressive steps so as not to overwhelm educational program faculty, students, or clinicians. Remarkably, all who were asked to become part of this dynamic enterprise accepted the invitation. In March 2013, this initial cadre of 12 participants met and, through their first deliberations, Frontiers in Rehabilitation Science and Technology was born. In formulating subsequent actions that each working group would undertake, we are guided by a set of objectives that defines informational bases that could be electronically accessible to all physical therapists, creates avenues for relevant information dissemination that do not exist, identifies mechanisms to update and perpetuate this effort, devises a plan that can/will be endorsed by educators and clinicians, determines others whose input will be invaluable to our collective effort, produces a report to the profession within 1 year to include an implementation plan, and achieves completion of these tasks in a cost-efficient manner. Since that initial meeting, each group has expanded its me