The Manual for Rehabilitation Treatment Specification (hereafter, “the Manual”), was developed under contract # ME-1403-14083 from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), with John Whyte, MD, PhD at the Institute as Principal Investigator. The manual is an attempt to distill concepts and procedures developed by a team of researchers and clinicians over a number of years (the “Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System” or RTSS), into a procedural guide. The manual describes the procedure by which rehabilitation treatments can be defined with respect to their known or hypothesized active ingredients, rather than the current incomplete and unsatisfactory alternatives of defining treatments by discipline (“10 hours of occupational therapy”) or the problem being addressed (“6 sessions of gait training”).

We anticipate that the concepts and procedures described in the Manual will need to undergo additional development and modification as clinicians and researchers explore their implementation. Accordingly, participants in the RTSS project have organized a Rehabilitation Treatment Specification Networking Group (RTS-NG) within the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine (ACRM), which meets monthly by teleconference to oversee further dissemination and implementation of the RTSS concepts and the Manual. Individuals interested in advancing rehabilitation treatment specifications can find additional information at ACRM. In addition, the Manual itself can be downloaded from the ACRM site after completing a brief user agreement.