Invited Commentary

My commentary on the report “Toward a Rehabilitation Treatment Taxonomy: Summary of Work in Progress”¹ reviews the history of the project, highlights the significance of this effort to the rehabilitation field, and summarizes its relevance to physical therapy. Efforts to develop the rehabilitation treatment taxonomy (RTT) began as an offshoot of a multisite study to examine relationships among rehabilitation treatments and poststroke outcomes using practice-based evidence methods. Rather than adopt a “black box” approach that views all treatments as standard and interchangeable (eg, 30 minutes of physical therapy), the study goal was to analyze the effects of specific components of rehabilitation treatments on poststroke outcomes. Because treatment information could not be reliably extracted from medical records, researchers worked with members of rehabilitation teams at each site to develop standardized treatment documentation forms for each discipline.² This study demonstrated the need for language and terminology to accurately define, describe, and categorize rehabilitation treatments. At the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine (ACRM) …