Continued Efforts Towards Maximizing Sustainability of the FPTR-Funded Center on Health Services Research

When the Center of Health Services Training and Research (CoHSTAR) was first envisioned close to 10 years ago, one of its goals was to build a sustainable, long-term capacity for physical therapy health services and health policy research training.

CoHSTAR was originally established in 2015 with a 5-year Foundation for Physical Therapy Research (FPTR) grant of $2.5 million, with a $1 million lead gift from the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA). In it’s first five years, CoHSTAR made great headway towards transforming the profession that FPTR decided to invest an additional $500,000 to fund COHSTAR for an extra two years. Soon after, FPTR elected once again to extend the multi-million-dollar health services research initiative for an additional three years, doubling the original scope of the grant.

Now, CoHSTAR is building on its work through several external grants and awards with large institutions like the National Institutes of Health and Veterans Affairs. It was due to the successes of CoHSTAR awardees and events that just last year, the Learning Health Systems Rehabilitation Research Network (LeaRRn) was created. LeaRRN, a national resource network to advance stakeholder-partnered, rehabilitation learning health systems research to improve quality of care, demonstrate value, and enhance patient and system outcomes, was made possible through a $5.5 million grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development and the National Institute for Nursing Research of the National Institutes of Health.

CoHSTAR awardees have received an additional three NIH Training Grants, six lager grants from institutions like NIAMS, Duke, the VA and PCORI, and over 13 smaller grants and loan repayments.