The Comparing Treatment Approaches to Promote Inpatient Rehabilitation Effectiveness for Traumatic Brain Injury (CARE4TBI)

CARE4TBI project is a pragmatic, stakeholder-driven observational study which aims to: 1) standardize electronic medical record (EMR) documentation of rehabilitation therapy to allow extraction for research and operations, 2) compare the effectiveness of well-defined rehabilitation approaches to improve community participation and functional independence of patients with TBI, and 3) identify patient, provider, setting and post-discharge factors that modify the effect of therapy on key outcomes. In addition to rehabilitation clinicians, persons living with TBI from the Ohio Valley Center Advisory Council will provide input on study implementation and interpretation of findings.

CARE4TBI involves up to 15 TBI Model System sites across the United States, and is led by Drs. Jennifer Bogner (contact PI, OSU), Cynthia Beaulieu (MPI, OSU), and Erinn Hade (MPI, NYU). Representatives from the VA Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center in Tampa, Florida will participate to determine how the findings can best be generalized to VA rehabilitation centers.

CARE4TBI will enroll approximately 1600 inpatients with moderate to severe TBI to determine which rehabilitation strategies work best for patients. We will leverage the infrastructure of the TBI Model Systems to incorporate the dynamic data from the EMR. Advanced statistical methods in causal inference will allow our team to investigate and differentiate rehabilitation approaches that optimize outcomes over the first year following injury.

This project is supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number UG3NS117844. The TBI Model Systems is funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research.