Accurate documentation reflecting high-quality occupational therapy serves as the foundation for validating the value of our services.
Continued follow-up of the established high-quality occupational cohorts would be worthwhile, although the scientific yield may be limited because exposure and health outcome misclassification limitations can probably not be remedied.
Failure of the profession to clearly demarcate what constitutes high-quality occupational therapy and demonstrate its contribution to the broader patient outcomes that value-based care will measure may marginalize occupational therapy in the rapidly changing health care environment.
For the profession to have the evidence base needed to advocate for high-quality occupational therapy in the era of value-based reimbursement, we need not only to produce more research, but also to develop a critical mass of trained researchers who can evaluate the quality, access, timing, and utilization of occupational therapy services.
Furthermore, as a team, researchers and clinicians can integrate current evidence with the pragmatics of clinical practice to define high-quality occupational therapy practice using the standardized quality measure development methods of the PCPI, AHRQ, and NQF (Min et al., 2011; Rubenstein et al., 2004; Wenger et al., 2010).
Specifically, we are able to create two continuous indices that expose the "common" quality of occupational match experienced by native-born wage earners in labor markets.
It is interesting to observe in Table 2 that the quality of occupational matching is higher (and similar) for mainly English-speaking countries and lower and similar for regions which are not largely English-speaking, such as Europe, Asia, and Africa.
The size of the data permits us to create two continuous indices that expose the "common" quality of occupational match experienced by native-born Canadian-educated workers in labor markets.
Since the comparative gain is calculated by simultaneous improvements in the quality of occupational match for both native-born and immigrant workers, the result shows the wage gain that immigrant workers would achieve, if they had the same distribution as native-born workers.
The approach we adopt in this study is to estimate a Mincerian wage function, augmented with controls for matching quality and occupational upgrading, among other things, to assess the returns to education of immigrants (both Canadian- and foreign-educated) relative to those of native-born Canadians.
