Exploring Quality-of-Care Topics for Users of Custom Ankle-Foot Orthoses

Abstract

As in all healthcare practice areas, there is a need to improve quality relevant to orthotic practice, but we lack information as to what aspects of healthcare quality are meaningful to measure. This symposium will report results from 3 phases of a project designed to identify the quality of care issues that are important to patients who use custom AFOs and the orthotists and physiotherapists who work with them. First, we will describe issues that are important to the quality-of-care for these stakeholders that emerged from focus groups. Participants discussed structural, process, and outcome domains of care quality relevant for people with custom AFOs. Next, we will report results from a scoping review that identified instruments that assess experience and outcomes with AFOs and the extent to which they are useful for evaluating care quality. We conducted 2 reviews: one focused on studies that evaluated experiences and outcomes of individuals who use AFOs; the second focused on psychometric properties of identified instruments. Finally, we will report results of a survey completed by orthotists and physical therapists regarding their priorities about quality measurement themes and the feasibility and utility of collecting data from persons using custom AFOs that could inform quality measure development. Results provide insight on the topics orthotists and physical therapists regard as priorities for defining healthcare quality for persons using custom ankle-foot orthoses and instruments for data collection.

Statement of the objective / learning objectives

(1) Describe issues important to the quality-of-care for custom AFO users,
(2) Discuss instruments that can measure these issues, and
(3) Identify the measurement priorities of orthotists and physical therapists.

This session focuses on the topic Outcome Measurements.