Implementation of a gait and balance battery of outcome measures in an inpatient rehabilitation hospital.
Leah Ling, Randy Carson, Geneviève N Olivier and 1 others
Individual gait and balance measures hit 70% completion within a year of implementation in an inpatient rehab hospital, but the full 5-measure battery never did.
Physical therapists said patient function and time were the main barriers.
Key findings
1All 5 individual outcome measures exceeded the 70% completion threshold by the fourth quarter, but the full battery never reached that target.
2Completion rates for every individual measure and the full battery increased significantly from the pre-implementation period to the first quarter after go-live.
377.3% of physical therapists agreed that patient functional level was a barrier to completing the battery, and 50% cited the time required.
Still to come
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
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What it does not show
Single hospital, so the results may not generalise to other inpatient rehab settings with different staffing, space, or EMR systems. The researchers could not tell whether a skipped measure was because the patient could not do it (which the guideline allows) or because the therapist ran out of time, so the true barrier is unclear. No time measurement was taken, so the actual minutes required for the full battery in a real session is unknown. The weekend-staffing group had small numbers (for example, 13 opportunities in Q1 for the SCI diagnosis), making those comparisons unreliable. The 70% target was borrowed from the literature rather than set by this hospital, so it is unclear whether a lower or higher target would be more realistic here.
Declared interests
The study received no external funding. No industry sponsorship or author conflicts are declared.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the 70% threshold being met for individual measures as evidence that the full 5-measure battery was successfully implemented. The full battery never reached 70% in any quarter, and the authors themselves note that 5 measures may have been too many for this setting. A therapist who assumes the whole battery is now standard practice in inpatient rehab would be overreading this result.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →