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SCI Service Director
VA Puget Sound Health Care System
My academic training, research experience, and administrative experience have provided me with background in a broad range of areas relevant to the health of individuals living with spinal cord injury (SCI). Since 1996, my research efforts and clinical care have been devoted to the management of the medical consequences of spinal cord injury (SCI) and neurological assessment and classification of SCI. I completed my residency at the site of an SCI Model System and participated in research involving prognosticating functional outcomes. Early in my post-residency career, I became a member of the American Spinal Injury Association’s International Standards Committee, and I subsequently served as Chair of the committee and later led a subcommittee that developed an alternate version of the standardized neurological examination and classification. For the past 25 years, I have practiced as a staff physician with the Veterans Affairs (VA) SCI Service at VA Puget Sound, where I now serve as the Director of the SCI Service. My service is responsible for providing care to more than 800 Veterans with chronic SCI who live in the Pacific Northwest. I have collaborated with health services researchers, primarily from the Hines VA Medical Center, involving secondary conditions associated with SCI and using VA administrative database as primary data sources. I served as the physician lead for the modernization of the VA SCI and Disorders (SCI/D) Patient Registry, which identifies more than 17,000 living Veterans who receive health care on an ongoing basis through the VA SCI/D System of Care. The SCI/D Registry supports clinical operations at the 25 SCI/D Centers, contains descriptive data such as neurological classifications and bladder management methods, and is linked to additional VA administrative databases. In modernizing the VA SCI/D registry, I provided consultation to optimize future use for research applications, including harmonization of variables with the International SCI Data Sets and planning for VA’s transition to a Cerner electronic medical record which began in 2020. My long-term goals as a researcher include examination of health and wellness outcomes achieved by the VA SCI/D System of Care, and promoting the use of VA SCI/D data sources to understand and improve the management of secondary conditions in individuals with SCI.