Rick Black, PT, DPT, MS is a Corporate Rehabilitation Director with ProMedica. ProMedica is a mission-based, not-for-profit integrated healthcare organization serving communities in 30 states. His research focuses on better understanding functional outcomes in older adults in Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNF).

As a LeaRRn scholar, Dr. Black will study factors that influence functional outcomes in older adults in SNF under the mentorship of Linda Resnik, PT, PhD, FAPTA, and Dan Ciolek, PT, MS, PMP. The United States has a rapidly growing older adult population with finite resources available for their rehabilitation care. Therefore, it is critically important that resources are spent in a way that best maximizes the value of services to patients, payers, and the healthcare system itself. This work will help to better understand the relationship between intensity, duration, frequency, mode, and type of rehabilitation service with functional gains in older adults and identify cost-effective treatment approaches that maintain or improve function and patient satisfaction. The data for this analysis will come from information collected by nearly 2000 clinicians in 153 ProMedica SNF around the country with a goal to create methodologies that can be scaled up using larger data sets to answer the scholarly questions with greater generalizability.