Healthcare Research

KEY FINDING: Delays in reaching specialist care increase the occurrence of complications such as pressure injuries and urinary tract infections.

KEY FINDING: Participants who did not receive needed care and/or were rehospitalized had the greatest number of secondary health conditions compared to the other groups.

KEY FINDING: Only 66% of TSCI patients were assessed by a urologist, with a median time of 0.7 years after the injury.

KEY FINDING: Approximately 65% of the spinal cord-injured population in the US engages in insufficient physical activity.

KEY FINDING: The model predicts that a 30-year old SCI patient with a life expectancy of 37 years initiating TAI will experience a 36% reduction in FI episodes.

KEY FINDING: Specialist hyperacute rehabilitation can be highly cost-efficient despite its relatively high initial cost.

KEY FINDING: Program interruption rates were low: 0.9% for stroke, 0.8% for TBI, and 1.4% for SCI.

KEY FINDING: Urodynamic studies are crucial for precise neurological assessment in determining appropriate bladder management for patients with SCI.

KEY FINDING: Combining health survey and claims data increased the estimated proportion of the sample with neuropsychiatric disorders to 50.0 %, compared to 38.9 % with health survey only and 33.2 % with claims only.

KEY FINDING: Accurate information on injury severity after tSCI was hindered by difficulties in conducting neurological assessments and classifications of SCI (e.g., timing), variations in reporting, and the lack of a validated SCI-specific measure of associated injuries.