White House/VA Conference
Emerging Technologies in Support of the New Freedom Initiative:
Promoting Opportunities for People with Disabilities October 13-14, 2004

“Today, more people accept the concept that cure can go hand-in-hand with care, and technology is absolutely fundamental to these advances.”—Dr. Mindy Aisen

Let me start today with a quote from Margaret Mead, who once said, “I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.”

When I took my current job at the VA, I saw it as the job of a lifetime. It was a chance to shape research in an environment where rehabilitation research could be conducted to provide desperately needed information and data to drive practice.

The job also had a very important personal meaning. My father was a World War II veteran, and I want to say that he was very proud of me. The most important things in life are love and work, and you get an extra bonus if your work enables others to meet their fundamental human needs.

The field of rehabilitation technology is rapidly evolving. Whether you’re a clinician, an engineer, a researcher, an advocate, a consumer, a policymaker, or a combination of the above, you find yourself in a field where today’s truth is tomorrow’s anachronism.

Early in my career as a neurologist in neurological rehab, we fought for our place in the rehabilitation field. Our insistence that genuine recovery was a possibility was often scoffed at as offering false hope. But today more people accept the concept that cure can go hand-in-hand with care, and technology is absolutely fundamental to these advances.

Mindy L. Aisen, MD, was appointed Director of the VA Rehabilitation Research and Development Service in September 1998 and assumed the additional role of Director of Technology Transfer for the Office of Research and Development in February 2000. Dr. Aisen received her undergraduate degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. She completed her residency at The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center and interned at Mount Sinai Hospital of Cleveland before joining The Burke Rehabilitation Center to serve as Director of the Spinal Cord Injury Service in 1987. Prior to her work at Burke, Dr. Aisen was an attending neurologist with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine Multiple Sclerosis Research and Training Center.

Compassion alone does not drive policy in the real world, and there are more important things than money. So, we have a convergence between financial issues and sharing information within the scientific community.

The engineering community, which is well-represented here today, has produced lots of new technologies with lots of gee-whiz factors. Yet access to these new technologies is uneven, because they’re expensive and we lack hard evidence that many of them are beneficial. With sufficient information, we will be able to furnish policymakers with the tools to provide necessary resources.

We’ve come together today—researchers, funders, policymakers, government leaders—to talk to one another about the need for innovation, the need for collaboration, and the barriers that we can help each other overcome. By the end of these two days, we hope to have forged alliances and to have concrete plans and suggestions to help our community. Thank you.