Southern California Spinal Cord Injury Model Systems (SoCal-SCIMS) Program at Rancho Los AmigosNational Rehabilitation Center (RLANRC) - The overarching goal of the SoCal-SCIMS is to generate and disseminate knowledge that directly contributes to restoring health, rebuilding life, and revitalizing hope for individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI). Our activities align with NIDILRR’s health and function, employment, and community living and participation domains as well as ACL’s strategic priorities of whole-person health, employment, and connecting people to services. As part of Los Angeles County’s “One System: One LA Health Services” network that serves 9.7 million people, RLANRC acts as the designated Patient-Centered Medical Home for SCI. Six integrated objectives are used to achieve our goal: 1) Comprehensive Service Delivery; 2) Participation in the National SCI Database; 3) Site-Specific Research; 4) Collaborative Research; 5) Evaluation; and 6) Dissemination and Knowledge Translation of SCI-focused knowledge. Our multidisciplinary system provides a comprehensive continuum of care system for most of the region’s trauma victims and includes Emergency Medical Services, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, and LA General Medical Center. We will capitalize on the team’s experience and our integrated electronic health record system for data acquisition into the National SCI Database. Our site-specific research, SPINE-VR (Spinal Cord Injury Pain Intervention Integrating Neuromodulation, Behavioral Education Program and Virtual Reality), will refine, pilot-test, and then evaluate via randomized clinical trial, a community-based non-pharmacologic biopsychosocial pain management program for chronic neuropathic pain after SCI. The proposed program enhances our recently developed psychophysical pain management intervention that includes physical exercise, meditation, heart rate variability biofeedback training and cognitive behavioral tools: it adds individualized social implementation and biological (anodal transcranial direct current stimulation paired with interactive virtual reality) components. Our collaborative module, Active for Life, will develop and administer a new survey, grounded in the ICF and Canadian Long-Term Development in Sport and Physical Activity models, to document and rank the relative importance of various factors, including wearable activity monitors, that drive recreational sport and physical activity participation by individuals with SCI. Anticipated outcomes include: 1) Increased knowledge about the incidence, causes, and outcomes of SCI; 2) An evidence-based intervention that integrates biological, psychophysical, and social components to facilitate active pain management behaviors in individuals with SCI; and 3) Identification of modifiable, high-priority targets for increasing sustained recreational sport and physical activity participation. Program outcomes will be shared with researchers, clinicians, individuals living with SCI and their support networks, and other community members through peer-reviewed publications, presentations, newsletters, factsheets, training materials, and guidelines for promoting active pain management and physical activity participation after SCI. Information will be disseminated through SoCal-SCIMS’s regional and national network (e.g., MSKTC, social media, and our annual Sara Mulroy SCI Symposium).
