Bringing a promising and ground-breaking solution that has been developed and tested in a research project into daily clinical practice is a challenge that researchers and physicians will recognize. In November 2022, pediatric rehabilitation physician Sarah Dekker won the Rehabilitation Prize for Innovative Patient Care to do just that for the prestigious GAIT.SCRIPT project. The project is led by Amsterdam UMC Cerebral Palsy Center of Expertise, Reade Centre for Rehabilitation and UMC Groningen, and based on a consensus paper from clinical gait analysis expert centers throughout the Netherlands (van der Krogt et al. 2022). We are very proud that Moveshelf has been chosen to implement and validate the feasibility of the transfer from research towards clinical practice for the GAIT.SCRIPT project.
Current health care for the treatment of children with CP frequently relies on clinical gait analysis. This is time consuming, requires extensive clinical experience and outcomes can vary (source). In the GAIT.SCRIPT project the research group of Marjolein van der Krogt and Annemieke Buizer at Amsterdam UMC described a workflow for standardizing gait analysis and treatment decision making in children with Cerebral Palsy (CP).
The initial innovation focused on developing a standardized and transparent method for clinical reasoning based on Impairment Focused Interpretation, in which abnormalities in a patient’s gait pattern are explained by underlying physical impairments (van der Krogt et al. 2022), and treatment decisions can be taken to directly address those impairments. After a proof of concept and feedback rounds, it became clear that improving the user experience was essential to make the tool suitable for clinical use.
Moveshelf combines technologies for visualizing and organizing all data related to gait analyses, with scalable data processing in the cloud, and a user-friendly interactive web interface. This can be used to highlight gait abnormalities and impairments and for delivering outcomes directly into the hands of the treating physicians through third part integration with clinical IT systems. This makes the Moveshelf Information System a valuable asset in solving all the challenges of implementing a clinical decision support algorithm into daily clinical practice.
Specifically, within the GAIT.SCRIPT project Moveshelf has implemented user and data-processing interfaces for both the input and output of the clinical reasoning process. The input contains data from a patient’s gait pattern where the user selects gait abnormalities. The output is an automatically generated list of possible underlying physical impairments that might explain the gait abnormalities, together with relevant information from the physical examination and a likelihood score. The clinician manually selects which impairments he/she thinks are applicable and the level of impact on the patient’s gait, resulting in a clear summary to be used for a well-informed conclusion and the best opportunities for intervention.
In the current research project, Amsterdam UMC aims to evaluate validity and usability of the developed tool. Clinicians and gait analysists from different centers in the Netherlands already indicated that they are willing to participate. Also interested in learning more and trying out the new tool? The project is still open for participants! Contact s.dekker@amsterdamumc.nl or k.wishaupt@amsterdamumc.nl for more information.
