First CPERL Chicago team publication and webinar

We recently submitted a special paper for publication. This paper reports on findings from a formative study that we undertook to guide the design of an e-health care planning guide involving families of young children with developmental disabilities and delays. This paper maps to CPERL Research Area #3.

This paper is special for two reasons. First, it took 3 years of hard work by 14 students at 2 institutions in order to get it done! Each student who committed to mentored research training in our lab got an opportunity to pitch in, and their curiosity, tenacity, and solidarity were vital to inching things forward. They were each authored or acknowledged for their respective efforts. Secondly, this study, like all of our work, rests on the key assumption that our profession is strengthened by empowering our clients with accessible options to truly partner in care provision. Developing an e-health solution for care plan development is one way of testing this assumption because we are exploring if we can program parts of our clinical reasoning for direct access by some of our clients. We are taking a major risk and have engaged in many lively debates around whether it makes sense and would even be possible to accomplish.

We celebrated our submission with a Thai inspired lab lunch, and then got back to work. Heather is preparing to co-present an invited webinar on this work, and the team is launching usability testing of an initial prototype of the e-health solution now with funds from the American Occupational Therapy Foundation (AOTF).