Maggie French, PT, DPT, PhD, NCS, assistant professor in the Department of Physical Therapy and Athletic Training, has received a Mentored Research Scientist Development Award (K01) from the National Institutes of Health.
The award provides support and protected time for an intensive, supervised career development experience in the biomedical, behavioral, or clinical sciences. French will use the next five-year period to become a leading independent investigator focused on improving the value of rehabilitation after stroke.
“In my PhD work, I did a lot of lab-based projects to understand variability in function and came to the conclusion that smaller-scale, lab-based studies wouldn’t change clinical care as fast as I wanted,” she said. “Now I’m focused on how we can use larger, real-world data to understand variability after stroke so we can help improve the value of care.”
Stroke patients can have very different recovery results. French hypothesizes this is in part because it’s hard to get consistent care across different settings—inpatient, outpatient, and home health services. Many people don’t receive enough care after their initial rehabilitation treatment, which can lead to poor outcomes.
“We want to study utilization patterns and how they relate to patient outcomes,” she said. “Some people can access services and that’s related to better outcomes—others have a lot of challenges that may cause other outcomes.”
To tackle this challenge, French has put together a dream team of a mentoring committee: primary mentor Amit Kumar, PhD, MPH, PT, and co-mentor Julie Fritz, PhD, PT, FAPTA, both from her department. Her other co-mentors are Julio Facelli, PhD, Jennifer Majersik, MD, and Angela Presson, PhD, a biomedical informatician, neurologist, and epidemiologist, respectively.
“I’m going to analyze Medicare data, which will provide a good national sample,” she said. “I’ll then look at longitudinal patterns of how people access rehab care during the first year of stroke by developing time series for patients from Medicare data.”
This descriptive study should help French and her team better understand what people are actually doing post-stroke. Once they have that knowledge, they can begin making recommendations for what can be improved in the healthcare system to ensure the people after stroke can access the rehabilitation care they need.
“It may help us time our therapy services better,” she said. “The intention is that it will provide us the information we need to better facilitate transitions throughout our healthcare system so that people have better function after their stroke.”
French had a typical path to the PT profession—she played sports growing up and had sports-related injuries. But during PT school, her first clinical rotation was at an inpatient rehab unit, and her focus quickly shifted to neurology work. Two doctoral degrees later, she completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at Johns Hopkins University.
“I thought the complex interactions between people’s cognitive function and motor abilities was just fascinating,” she said. “For these folks, it’s the foundational things of life we take for granted that we’re helping them get back. It’s gratifying on a different level.”
Now she’s using that expertise in research and started as faculty with the Department of Physical Therapy and Athletic Training last summer. After completing her K01 study, French hopes to begin submitting R01 proposals that combine health data sources to better help understand outcome and utilization at scale.
“It’s my first grant as a faculty member here, so it’s exciting to get your first big success,” she said. “I’m glad I’ve been able to put together such a good mentoring team and I think I’m going to learn a lot and contribute to our knowledge thread.”