Currently submitted to: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Aug 17, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Aug 26, 2026 - Oct 21, 2026
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The ICF-REHA-Tool – Validation of a tool for data management of multiprofessional assessments and ICF-categorical profiles in outpatient work-related medical rehabilitation
ABSTRACT
Background:
To achieve the best outcome in rehabilitation, rehabilitation measures have been established in interprofessional teams using multiprofessional assessments to capture health-related quality of life, patient satisfaction and patient functioning on the basis of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). With increased coordination and management efforts, especially in the setting of outpatient rehabilitation, this results in the need for support from tools to optimize data collection and data processing, including visualization of assessment results in ICF-categorical profiles and to facilitate daily work routines. Validation processes for In-House/custom-developed software tools are reported only seldom in medicine and are not requested in widely accepted medical reporting guidelines.
Objective:
The objective of this study was to validate a developed software tool. Through the validation of the ICF-Rehabilitation (REHA)-Tool, a reliable software tool could be implemented in the practical workflow of outpatient rehabilitation and used to evaluate the effectiveness of outpatient rehabilitation measures in a military setting. The report on the tool’s validation process is also intended to serve as a guide for validation routine in various medical fields.
Methods:
The ICF-REHA-Tool was developed and validated through the following steps: “aims and requirements”, “risk analysis”, “technical requirements”, “tool development”, “functionality test”, “pilot testing”, “process documentation”, “usage instructions”, “approval” and “maintenance and updates” on the basis of a widely accepted best-practice approach.
Results:
Through the validation of the ICF-REHA-Tool, it has been possible to implement a reliable software tool to collect and process data. The tool offers the automated calculation and output of assessment scores, the visualization of functioning in ICF-categorical profiles, the documentation of interprofessional case conferences and data provision for data transfer and statistical analysis for use in everyday work in outpatient rehabilitation.
Conclusions:
The ICF-REHA-Tool is a qualified and reliable software tool for the data collection and processing of rehabilitation assessments. Validation should become a standardized process for tools used in research and in clinical practice for all medical specialties to achieve high-quality outcomes. Clinical Trial: The rehabilitation study in which the ICF-REHA-Tool is embedded was registered in the German registry of clinical studies (DRKS 00022793; https://drks.de/search/de/trial/DRKS00022793) and has received a positive vote from the ethics committee of the University Medical Centre Rostock (registry no. A2020-0011, January 14, 2020).
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.