National Pediatric Rehabilitation Resource Center (C-PROGRESS)

2020-2021 Funding Cycle

The National Pediatric Rehabilitation Resource Center offers an annual Pilot Studies program. This program encourages innovation and funds pilot studies with high potential for discovering efficacious treatments and promoting their rapid, high-fidelity application in clinical and community settings. The Center also considers methods and techniques development research – particularly when the topic fills a critical gap or seeks to overcome a major obstacle to conducting high-quality medical rehabilitation research with pediatric populations.

C-PROGRESS offers a wide mix of didactic activities to assist others in the following areas: developing, rigorously testing, and appropriately measuring outcomes of new pediatric rehabilitation treatments via a variety of research designs; analyzing multivariate and longitudinal data from pediatric clinical trials that face unique challenges, because children are developing at varying rates over the course of rehabilitation treatment and throughout the follow-up period; developing and applying tools to measure Fidelity of Treatment Implementation; and designing and conducting research in the relatively new field of Implementation Science, so that efficacious treatments can be applied in a timely and effective way in real world settings to realize maximum benefits. These Didactic Interactions offerings are designed to be practically useful for scientists and clinicians interested in furthering clinical pediatric rehabilitation research.

The core team of investigators behind C-PROGRESS are senior scientists working in pediatric rehabilitation centers based at Virginia Tech in Roanoke, Virginia and The Ohio State University, and Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Individuals and research teams who seek to make high-impact and novel contributions to pediatric medical rehabilitation research have the opportunity to apply for mentored collaborative opportunities through C-PROGRESS. C-PROGRESS provides intensive mentored collaborative experiences that focus on increasing the competencies of investigators and the quality of their competitive applications in pediatric rehabilitation research. These include a mix of educational and hands-on opportunities that will support Phase I through Phase III clinical trials, comparative effectiveness and practices-based research, focused methods research, and implementation science trials. 

The National Pediatric Rehabilitation Resource Center (C-PROGRESS) engages in the development of promising techniques that address critical gaps in methods or technology in the field of pediatric rehabilitation. Pediatric rehabilitation research would benefit immensely from more sensitive, valid, and reliable approaches to measuring the emergence of new skills and their use in everyday function. Many tools currently in the new Common Data Elements for cerebral palsy were developed initially for typically developing children. Our C-PROGRESS scientists have been active in developing and validating novel assessment tools, from kinematics to parent reporting tools, and created the first Fidelity of Treatment tools for pediatric constraint-induced movement therapy and bimanual treatments.