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A Letter From Matt Cartwright:

Last week, I introduced the Wounded Warrior Research Enhancement Act. Our nation’s brave warfighters served in Afghanistan and Iraq with honor and distinction and we have a moral obligation to provide all of our soldiers with the best health care available. This much needed legislation would enhance orthotic and prosthetic research, helping practitioners better match prosthetic and orthotic devices with veteran amputees.

Over 1,700 soldiers have suffered combat-related limb loss due to the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Department of Veterans Affairs serves approximately 40,000 individuals with limb loss each year. Despite this number, many practitioners rely on personal experience and trial-and-error methods, rather than empirical data, to determine which prosthetic device will work best for a given patient. This can result in a patient being fitted for several different devices before the ideal fit is found, a lengthy and potentially costly process.

There are just over 7,100 practitioners specially trained in orthotics and prosthetics nationwide, and of those, one in five are either past retirement age or eligible to retire in the next 5 years. With a large portion of these seasoned clinicians facing retirement in the coming decade, it is imperative that we harness this tremendous resource of institutional knowledge before we lose it forever.

That is why this legislation would award $30 million in grants to establish the first centralized collection of outcomes-based research on orthotics and prosthetics. This comprehensive research would provide practitioners with the knowledge they need to improve the likelihood that a veteran’s first prosthetic device will also be the best, saving time and money. Additionally, the research collection will provide information on advanced materials, technologies and devices.