The 2006 House of Delegates of the American Physical Therapy Association passed RC23-06, which mandated:

That the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) convene a Summit in or by 2010 with annual reports to the House of Delegates that shall focus on how physical therapists can meet current, evolving, and future societal health care needs. The consideration of innovative process, technology, or practice models by this Summit on Physical Therapy and Society shall not be constrained by existing law, regulation, education, or reimbursement policy. Summit participants shall include but not be limited to leaders within: physical therapy, health policy, public policy, academia, engineering, bioscience, theology, and information technology.1

This task was undertaken by a steering committee that first gathered in the fall of 2007, at which time a plan was set in motion to institute a Physical Therapy and Society Summit by the spring of 2009 with a subsequent report to the House of Delegates in June of that year. For the next 14 months, the committee worked diligently to convene an interdisciplinary group of rehabilitationists, including physical therapy clinicians, educators, and scientists, as well as engineers, ethicists, health care policy makers, physician specialists, federal and private research organizations, and consumers.

The Physical Therapy and Society Summit meeting, held on February 27 to 28, 2009, represented a dynamic and creative interaction from which many recommendations emerged.2 All recommendations were included in a report to the 2009 House of Delegates, which voted unanimously to accept its contents. There were several suggestions that captured the attention of steering committee members, including the following:

* Collaborate to develop and provide leadership in testing and applications of new technologies and approaches that optimize health care delivery.

* Revisit the interface among practice, education, research, AND technological advances.

* Create mechanisms allowing all physical therapists to become familiar and stay contemporary with real and virtual technologies.

* Promote the translation and integration of technology and science and foster collaborations with engineering, industry, and others.

While a history of these and other recommendations has been documented,3 the experience inspired us to further purse dissemination efforts at educational leadership and component meetings.

Last year, we proposed to convene knowledgeable academic and clinical physical therapists, as well as colleagues from several other scientific and technological environments, to begin configuring informational resources governing genomics, regenerative rehabilitation, biotechnology (virtual environments and robotics), and telehealth. The intention was to generate a rapidly expanding knowledge base that could be shared with the entire American Physical Therapy Association membership and expressed in progressive steps so as not to overwhelm educational program faculty, students, or clinicians. Remarkably, all who were asked to become part of this dynamic enterprise accepted the invitation. In March 2013, this initial cadre of 12 participants met and, through their first deliberations, Frontiers in Rehabilitation Science and Technology was born. In formulating subsequent actions that each working group would undertake, we are guided by a set of objectives that defines informational bases that could be electronically accessible to all physical therapists, creates avenues for relevant information dissemination that do not exist, identifies mechanisms to update and perpetuate this effort, devises a plan that can/will be endorsed by educators and clinicians, determines others whose input will be invaluable to our collective effort, produces a report to the profession within 1 year to include an implementation plan, and achieves completion of these tasks in a cost-efficient manner.

Since that initial meeting, each group has expanded its membership to include more physical therapists and volunteers from other disciplines. The advantages in creating such integrated teams include the unique opportunities to enhance our communications, learn from one another, create unique dissemination vehicles, foster the development of interdisciplinary learning experiences for our students, and expand the interface between scientific and technological discoveries and relevance to the practice of physical therapy.

Although we may not realize the exponential manner in which knowledge is expanding in these areas, scientists and engineers are turning to us to apply their findings. As an example of such growth, consider the field of regenerative rehabilitation. A PubMed survey on this topic produced 13 642 articles through 2012, of which only 97 were generated before 1990. A subcategory of this specialty, regenerative rehabilitation, has yielded 282 articles through 2012, with only 27 of those published before 2000! This latter topic has profound implications for physical therapy in general and neurorehabilitation in particular. The use of intermittent hypoxia as a plasticity primer for patients with incomplete spinal cord injury may drive motor output to lower extremity muscles.4 Will this approach produce a new therapy? How might it best be applied? What are the underlying mechanisms? This example can be easily substituted by many others.

The Frontiers in Rehabilitation Science and Technology group will be exploring the best ways to inform physical therapists about the fundamental underpinnings within these 4 areas as a basis for progressing through a constructive learning experience. In the coming months, there will be several more formal discussions and dissemination efforts. The acquisition of this information also affords opportunities for our educational entities to revisit their missions. Might there be distinct advantages for physical therapy students to be in a classroom with their counterparts from other professions or disciplines? Does the emergence and relevance of these large information resources dictate a need to rethink the distribution of our educational emphases? As examples, do we need to spend as much time on such tasks as learning goniometry or neuromuscular reeducation procedures that lack evidence for their efficacy or effectiveness while still preserving the importance of our "hands on" approach? Should we not be embracing the need to expand our horizons to meet the challenges that are already beckoning us to apply medical and technology discoveries to the human condition?

Fundamentally, these were the questions posed by our external consultants at the 2009 PASS meeting. For the past 3 years, these have been percolating in the minds of forward-thinking physical therapists. FiRST and foremost, do we not owe it to our patients to acquire the knowledge that will allow us to successfully navigate the road to discovery?

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