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Abstract Most rehabilitation treatments are volitional in nature, meaning that they require the patient's active engagement and effort. Volitional treatments are particularly challenging to define in a standardized fashion, because the clinician is not in complete control of the patient's role in enacting these treatments. Current recommendations for describing treatments in research reports fail to distinguish between 2 fundamentally different aspects of treatment design: the selection of treatment ingredients to produce the desired functional change and the selection of ingredients that will ensure the patient's volitional performance. The Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System (RTSS) is a conceptual scheme for standardizing the way that rehabilitation treatments are defined by all disciplines across all areas of rehabilitation. The RTSS highlights the importance of volitional behavior in many treatment areas and provides specific guidance for how volitional treatments should be specified. In doing so, it suggests important crosscutting research questions about the nature of volitional behavior, factors that make it more or less likely to occur, and ingredients that are most effective in ensuring that patients perform desired treatment activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Rehabilitation clinicians strive to provide cost-effective, patient-centered care that optimizes outcomes. A barrier to this ideal is the lack of a universal system for describing, or specifying, rehabilitation interventions. Current methods of description vary across disciplines and settings, creating barriers to collaboration, and tend to focus mostly on functional deficits and anticipated outcomes, obscuring connections between clinician behaviors and changes in functioning. The Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System (RTSS) is the result of more than a decade of effort by a multidisciplinary group of rehabilitation clinicians and researchers to develop a theory-based framework to specify rehabilitation interventions. The RTSS describes interventions for treatment components, which consist of a target (functional change brought about as a direct result of treatment), ingredients (actions taken by clinicians to change the target), and a hypothesized mechanism of action, as stated in a treatment theory. The RTSS makes explicit the connections between functional change and clinician behavior, and recognizes the role of patient effort in treatment implementation. In so doing, the RTSS supports clinicians' efforts to work with their patients to set achievable goals, select appropriate treatments, adjust treatment plans as needed, encourage patient participation in the treatment process, communicate with team members, and translate research findings to clinical care. The RTSS may help both expert and novice clinicians articulate their clinical reasoning processes in ways that benefit treatment planning and clinical education, and may improve the design of clinical documentation systems, leading to more effective justification and reimbursement for services. Interested clinicians are invited to apply the RTSS in their local settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The field of rehabilitation remains captive to the black-box problem: our inability to characterize treatments in a systematic fashion across diagnoses, settings, and disciplines, so as to identify and disseminate the active ingredients of those treatments. In this article, we describe the Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System (RTSS), by which any treatment employed in rehabilitation may be characterized, and ultimately classified according to shared properties, via the 3 elements of treatment theory: targets, ingredients, and (hypothesized) mechanisms of action. We discuss important concepts in the RTSS such as the distinction between treatments and treatment components, which consist of 1 target and its associated ingredients; and the distinction between targets, which are the direct effects of treatment, and aims, which are downstream or distal effects. The RTSS includes 3 groups of mutually exclusive treatment components: Organ Functions, Skills and Habits, and Representations. The last of these comprises not only thoughts and feelings, but also internal representations underlying volitional action; the RTSS addresses the concept of volition (effort) as a critical element for many rehabilitation treatments. We have developed an algorithm for treatment specification which is illustrated and described in brief. The RTSS stands to benefit the field in numerous ways by supplying a coherent, theory-based framework encompassing all rehabilitation treatments. Using a common framework, researchers will be able to test systematically the effects of specific ingredients on specific targets; and their work will be more readily replicated and translated into clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article summarizes important points on the need for a rehabilitation treatment taxonomy. The features of a proposed conceptual framework to support the development of a rehabilitation treatment taxonomy that can be used by all disciplines are outlined and the immediate and long-term benefits of the proposed framework are discussed. Commentaries by various scholars on the classifications of health interventions and the rehabilitation treatment taxonomy are presented.

The article discusses a study that investigated the interrater reliability of the International Spinal Cord Injury Pain (ISCIP) classification as used by physicians and other clinicians who received minimal training in use of the classification. Participants prepared clinical vignettes, which were assigned to a category of the classification by experts. Results showed moderate reliability in use of the ISCIP classification in participants using the clinical vignette approach.

Abstract: In relation to the conceptual framework for a rehabilitation treatment taxonomy (RTT), which has been proposed in other articles in this supplement, this article discusses a number of issues relevant to its further development, including creating distinctions within the major target classes; the nature and quantity of allowable targets of treatment; and bracketing as a way of specifying (1) the skill or knowledge taught; (2) the nature of compensation afforded by changes in the environment, assistive technology, and orthotics/prosthetics; and (3) the ingredients in homework a clinician assigns. Clarification is provided regarding the role of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, focusing a taxonomy on ingredients versus other observable aspects of treatment, and regarding our lack of knowledge and its impact on taxonomy development. Finally, this article discusses the immediate implications of the work to date and presents the need for rehabilitation stakeholders of all disciplines to be involved in further RTT development. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Objective: To gain an understanding of clinical thought processes about treatment classification and description, and to identify desired characteristics of and challenges to be addressed by a future rehabilitation treatment taxonomy. Design: Qualitative analysis of data collected via focus groups and semistructured interviews. Setting: Inpatient rehabilitation programs. Participants: Clinicians (N=84) in 7 disciplines involved in data collection for practice-based evidence studies of spinal cord injury and traumatic brain injury rehabilitation. Interventions: Not applicable. Main Outcome Measure: Summary of themes reported by clinicians, determined by content analysis of focus group and interview transcripts. Results: The multifaceted nature of rehabilitation treatment was identified as a major challenge to the process of classifying interventions. Simultaneous delivery of multiple interventions, performance of integrated tasks that challenge multiple body systems, and conversation-based treatments were reported to be difficult to classify. Clinicians reported that treatment classifications that make reference to goals of treatment were clinically intuitive, but they also reported difficulties when attempting to classify activities that could address multiple goals. These rehabilitation practitioners considered the setting in which treatment occurs, equipment used, assistance or cueing provided, type of treatment participants, and specific tasks performed to be important descriptors of their interventions. They recommended creating a classification system that can be applied at greater or lesser levels of detail depending on the purpose for which it is being used. Conclusions: Treatment descriptors identified may be useful for differentiating classes of treatments or characterizing treatments within classes. Precise definition of the concept of the goal as it relates to treatment theory and definition of boundaries between treatments may aid classification of multifaceted treatment activities. A balance between detail and feasibility of use will facilitate successful clinical application of a future classification system. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Rehabilitation is in need of an organized system or taxonomy for classifying treatments to aid in research, practice, training, and interdisciplinary communication. In this article, we describe a work-in-progress effort to create a rehabilitation treatment taxonomy (RTT) for classifying rehabilitation interventions by the underlying treatment theories that explain their effects. In the RTT, treatments are grouped together according to their targets, or measurable aspects of functioning they are intended to change; ingredients, or measurable clinician decisions and behaviors responsible for effecting changes; and the hypothesized mechanisms of action by which ingredients are transformed into changes in the target. Four treatment groupings are proposed: structural tissue properties, organ functions, skilled performances, and cognitive/affective representations, which are similar in the types of targets addressed, ingredients used, and mechanisms of action that account for change. The typical ingredients and examples of clinical treatments associated with each of these groupings are explored, and the challenges of further subdivision are discussed. Although a Linnaean hierarchical tree structure was envisioned at the outset of work on the RTT, further development may necessitate a model with less rigid boundaries between classification groups, and/or a matrix-like structure for organizing active ingredients along selected continua, to allow for both qualitative and quantitative variations of importance to treatment effects. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Many rehabilitation treatment interventions, unlike pharmacologic treatments, are not operationally defined, and the labels given to such treatments do not specify the active ingredients that produce the intended treatment effects. This, in turn, limits the ability to study and disseminate treatments, to communicate about them clearly, or to train new clinicians to administer them appropriately. We sought to begin the development of a system of classification of rehabilitation treatments and services that is based on their active ingredients. To do this, we reviewed a range of published descriptions of rehabilitation treatments and treatments that were familiar to the authors from their clinical and research experience. These treatment examples were used to develop preliminary rules for defining discrete treatments, identifying the area of function they directly treat, and identifying their active ingredients. These preliminary rules were then tested against additional treatment examples, and problems in their application were used to revise the rules in an iterative fashion. The following concepts, which emerged from this process, are defined and discussed in relation with the development of a rehabilitation treatment taxonomy: rehabilitation treatment taxonomy; treatment and enablement theory; recipient (of treatment); essential, active, and inactive ingredients; mechanism of action; targets and aims of treatment; session; progression; dosing parameters; and social and physical environment. It is hoped that articulation of the conceptual issues encountered during this project will be useful to others attempting to promote theory-based discussion of rehabilitation effects and that multidisciplinary discussion and research will further refine these rules and definitions to advance rehabilitation treatment classification. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The idea of constructing a taxonomy of rehabilitation interventions has been around for quite some time, but other than small and mostly ad hoc efforts, not much progress has been made, in spite of articulate pleas by some well-respected clinician scholars. In this article, treatment taxonomies used in health care, and in rehabilitation specifically, are selectively reviewed, with a focus on the need to base a rehabilitation treatment taxonomy (RTT) on the “active ingredients” of treatments and their link to patient/client deficits/problems that are targeted in therapy. This is followed by a description of what we see as a fruitful approach to the development of an RTT that crosses disciplines, settings, and patient diagnoses, and a discussion of the potential uses in and benefits of a well-developed RTT for clinical service, research, education, and service administration. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This article introduces the Archives supplement presenting a conceptual framework for the creation of a rehabilitation treatment taxonomy (RTT). It describes the key theoretical and empirical articles and their role, and the commentaries that were solicited. More importantly, based on feedback received to date, it sketches what the RTT is proposed to address, and what it explicitly excludes; therefore, the readers will have appropriate expectations and criteria for what is offered. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]