Technical Report - Clinical Service Program Databases (Version 1.0)

Clinical Database Technical Report (PDF, 483KB)

Summary

Existing assistive technology clinical databases were chosen for analysis both for their potential to provide a status report of AT outcomes in current systems and to guide future development. First, the design and content of existing systems provide us with the ability to look at what is currently collected, how it is currently analyzed, and how it could be analyzed for AT outcomes. Second, analysis of the results from the first portion could then be used to identify existing systems and strategies that might be beneficial to carry through into the development of a national system. The analysis confirmed suspicions and experience that no current systematic methodology exists to collect outcomes related data consistently within or across assistive technology service programs. The data collected by these programs are idiosyncratic and colloquial to particular institutions and tend and to be very limited in what types of data and for what purposes they are compiled. This is not surprising given that there are few known service delivery systems that collect data specifically for outcomes analysis, other than for program evaluation.