Impact of social determinants of health on rehabilitation service use and outcomes in adults in the USA: a scoping review protocol.

Introduction: Many Americans fail to receive equitable access to or positive outcomes from rehabilitation services. These disparities result from broader societal inequities that disproportionately affect certain groups of people due to non-medical factors such as race, gender, education and living status. This scoping review aims to describe research papers that examine social determinants of health (SDOH) that underlie disparities in access to, use of, or outcomes related to rehabilitation (in occupational therapy, physical therapy, recreational therapy, rehabilitation medicine/physiatry and speech-language pathology) among adults in the USA.

Development of an ontology to characterize mental functioning.

Purpose Of The Article: This article describes a conceptual and methodological approach to integrating functional information into an ontology to categorize mental functioning, which to date is an under-developed area of classification, and supports our work with the United States (U.S.) Social Security Administration (SSA).

Extracting body function information using rule-based methods: Highlighting structure and formatting challenges in clinical text.

This paper describes the identification of body function (BF) mentions within the clinical text within a large, national, heterogeneous corpus to highlight structural challenges presented by the clinical text. BF in clinical documents provides information on dysfunction or impairments in the function or structure of organ systems or organs. BF mentions are embedded in highly formatted structures where the formats include implied scoping boundaries that confound existing natural language processing segmentation and document decomposition techniques.

Linking job duties, functioning, and employment status using the Work-Disability Functional Assessment Battery (WD-FAB): An expert coding and quantitative analysis.

Background: An understanding of the link between specific occupational demands and individual worker functioning is limited, although such information could permit an assessment of the fit between the two in a manner that would inform national and state disability programs such as vocational rehabilitation and Social Security disability programs.

Objective: Our goal was to examine the utility of assessing physical and mental functioning relative to self-reported job duties to identify the domains of worker functioning most likely to create barriers to fulfilling an occupation's specific requirements.

Methods: Through primary survey data collection, 1770 participants completed the Work-Disability Functional Assessment Battery (WD-FAB) instrument after reporting details on their occupations (or most recent occupation if not working).