National Data and Statistical Center

Mayo Clinic Traumatic Brain Injury Model System

The Mayo Clinic Traumatic Brain Injury Model System (TBIMS) is part of the Mayo Clinic-Rochester and the College of Medicine. With over 32,000 health care providers, extensive outpatient facilities, nearly 2,000 hospital-beds, and a level I trauma center that serves virtually all people with moderate to severe TBI in the region, Mayo Clinic-Rochester is a world resource that hosts 1.5 million patient visits each year from people of highly diverse ethnic, racial, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Despite Mayo Clinic’s status as a world class medical center, nearly 80% of its patients come from Minnesota and adjoining states. Mayo Clinic provides tertiary care to a network of affiliated primary care centers in 60 other communities throughout southern Minnesota, northern Iowa, and western Wisconsin. Most people with brain injury served at Mayo Clinic come from this largely rural region in the upper Midwest.

In the 2007-2012 funding cycle, the Mayo Clinic TBIMS will continue to work collaboratively with other TBIMS centers, the TBI National Data & Statistical Center, and the NIDRR Knowledge Translation Center and will continue long standing dissemination and community outreach activities. Additionally, one primary local research project is being conducted. Midwest Advocacy Project (MAP) represents the first randomized clinical trial studying the efficacy of community-based advocacy training to impart effective self and systems advocacy skills to individuals with TBI, their families, and significant others. The MAP focuses on the NIDRR Long Range Plan research domain of participation and community living and was developed with substantive input from consumers and other stake holders of the Mayo Regional TBI Advisory Council. The project builds on a feasibility study conducted in the last funding cycle and will be carried out in collaboration with the Brain Injury Associations of Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. The anticipated long term outcome is the nation wide use of an efficacious advocacy training program. The Mayo Clinic TBIMS will also collaborate with other TBI Model Systems on module projects studying headache after TBI, sexuality after TBI, and the environmental influences affecting outcomes after TBI through the recording of geographic modifiers for place of residence.