Editors’ Note: Volume Overview

The current issue of the International Journal of Telerehabilitation (IJT) contains original research that investigates the efficacy of in-home telerehabilitation for people with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).  Tousignant and colleagues concluded: “in-home telerehabilitation for people with COPD is a realistic alternative to dispense rehabilitation services for patients requiring physical therapy follow-up.”
 Jamie Schutte and colleagues evaluated a telerehabilitation system for community based research. The telerehabilitation system consists of a web-based portal to support a variety of clinical activities and the Versatile Integrated System for Telerehabilitation (VISYTER) video-conferencing system to support the collaboration and delivery of rehabilitation services remotely. 
Two Brief Communications authored by speech-language pathologists Michael Towey and James Coyle, respectively, present the possibilities for significant telehealth-related cost-savings when telepractice is implemented in clinical practice. 
A third in a series of articles by Valerie Watzlaf and colleagues provides insights into users’ perceptions of the privacy and security of the three top used consumer-based, free Voice and video over the Internet Protocol (VoIP) software systems (e.g., Skype and others) used by health care providers to deliver therapeutic services via telerehabilitation. The          article poses recommendations to VoIP companies, users, and clients/consumers. A value-added aspect of the work is that it offers an accessible, “hands-on” usability protocol and provocative questions that can be adopted by educators for classroom use across disciplines to facilitate awareness and understanding of VoIP companies’ privacy and security policies.
The theme of licensure portability, featured in this journal’s fall 2011 issue, continues via a recent document generated by the American Telemedicine Association’s Telerehabilitation Special Interest Group, Licensure Portability Working Group.  Since August, 2010, this working group has attempted to identify the barriers related to inter-state licensure portability for rehabilitation professionals (i.e., occupational therapy practitioners, physical therapy practitioners, speech-language pathologists, and audiologists). The current report, “Making the Case for Uniformity in Professional State Licensure Requirements”, advances the thesis that “licensure portability will best succeed when variability between licensure requirements is minimized and an efficient licensure process exists,” and proposes a protocol to discern opportunities for uniformity.

Call for Submissions
The next volume of the International Journal of Telerehabilitation will be published in fall, 2012. We cordially invite your submissions by October 1, 2012, and accept original research, case studies, viewpoints, technology reviews, book reviews, and country reports that detail the current status of telerehabilitation.
Our peer reviewers constitute a multi-disciplinary group, and include researchers and clinicians from each of the major rehabilitation disciplines, rehabilitation engineers, health information managers, information technologists, and others. We welcome new peer-reviewers and invite guest editors with ideas for special, thematically focused issues.  The IJT publication team is agile and can add additional issues as warranted to ensure currency.  Please contact Editor Ellen Cohn, PhD if you are interested: ecohn@pitt.edu.

Acknowledgments
We acknowledge the contributions of our authors and the support of new and returning reviewers; colleagues at the Rehabilitation Research Engineering Center on Telerehabilitation; and our publishers, Timothy S. Deliyannides, Director, Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing, and Head, Information Technology, University Library System, and Vanessa Gabler, Electronic Publications Associate at the University of Pittsburgh.

Respectfully,
Ellen R. Cohn, PhD, CCC-SLP
Editor
Jana Cason, DHS, OTR/L
Associate Editor 

International Journal of Telerehabilitation; telerehab.pitt.edu; Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 2012; doi: 10.5195/ijt.2012.6084