Bill Andrews, associate professor in the Department of Physical Therapy Education, is the 1st author of an article published ahead of print in Physical Therapy.
Furthermore, the article has been highlighted in PT in Motion, an online and print publication of the American Physical Therapy Association (http://www.apta.org/PTinMotion/News/2015/8/24/RehabIntensityPoststroke/).
The article is entitled Association of Rehabilitation Intensity for Stroke and Risk of Hospital Readmission. Co-investigators in this study included Dongmei Li and Janet Freburger, both with The Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Physical Therapy is the official scientific journal of the American Physical Therapy Association and it has a circulation of ~90,000. Its Impact Factor is 2.526, which ranks it #8 out of all 62 rehabilitation journals.
The study began as the result of a sabbatical Andrews was granted in 2012. The researchers accessed State Inpatient Databases which are made available to researchers through the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. They reviewed data from 64,065 patients admitted to hospitals with a diagnosis of stroke. They found that after controlling for several factors, including illness severity, the higher the intensity of rehabilitation services provided to the patients, the lower their rate of re-admission to the hospital was. This held true for both the 30-day and the 90-day hospital readmission rates. The investigators concluded that the results “support the contention of clinical practice guidelines that recommend patients hospitalized with an acute stroke receive rehabilitation services as soon and as much as practicable.”
