Author Response

I thank Daley for her valuable comments and insight on the need for a taxonomy system in rehabilitation.¹ The demand for data and information to support physical therapy's role in new models of health care delivery and payment is growing rapidly. For example, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has announced the development of a framework for assessing the quality of data in electronic databases in order to help clinical investigators, patients, and policy makers understand the value of data used to generate new clinical knowledge and has issued a call for input. Data that are determined to be of value will likely be used to inform comparative effectiveness research, patient-centered outcomes research, quality improvement, and support of clinical care.²

The American Physical Therapy Association's (APTA) Physical Therapy Outcomes Registry is an important step in the development of a meaningful database³ that will provide useful information about physical therapist practice to inform decisions about new models of care and payment. Making the data available in the right format and to the right audiences will be critical. Additionally, APTA must consider the data and information that are available through external databases that can be accessed and analyzed to support our goals.

The adoption of a taxonomy that will help identify which treatments work for which conditions and why will provide an important framework for the collection of data and information that will benefit our profession and our patients. It is important that we not skip this important step in our rush to provide data. I look forward to the ongoing interprofessional dialogue about this taxonomy and to future research in this area by Dijkers and colleagues.⁴

• © 2014 American Physical Therapy Association