Annual Report 2023-2024

motion analysis centers lead effort to Standardize Practice Shriners Children’s is leading the way in motion analysis, with efforts that not only help elevate our patient care but are also likely to be highly influential far beyond our healthcare system. Fourteen of our locations have a motion analysis laboratory. It’s a kind of computerized, video studio where how a person moves and walks can be recorded and analyzed in great detail. It is the same technology that it used by Hollywood to make movies like Avatar , Iron Man and Polar Express . At Shriners Children’s, it’s used for patients with movement disorders, such as cerebral palsy, as well as those with sports or play related injuries and other orthopedic conditions. Physicians use the data gathered to plan customized treatment plans. Motion analysis can also help clinicians determine when it’s safe for student athletes to get back in the game after an injury. The field, which has been around for 30 years, has begun pushing a national certification program to assure quality among labs in the last few years, an effort that Shriners Children’s has strongly supported. Recently, our labs have published a two-year effort to standardize everything they do across all of our 14 locations, creating the Shriners Children’s Gait Model. According to Ross Chafetz, Ph.D., DPT, corporate director of motion analysis centers for the Shriners Children’s system, the model is important because “for clinical care, our patients come from all across the country, and we share patients, depending on what they need and where they live.” It means, a doctor in one location can look at the evaluation from another location and know that it is just the same quality as what they expect from their own lab. “It was great to see labs learn from each other and compromise to elevate the clinical care across all our labs,” said Dr. Chafetz.

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