Meadows and Shoemark Awarded Prestigious 2023 AMTA Arthur Flagler Fultz Award

Director of Music Therapy Studies, Coordinator of Graduate Music Therapy and Associate Professor of Music Therapy Anthony Meadows, Ph.D., and Temple University’s Professor of Music Therapy Helen Shoemark, Ph.D., were the recipients of the 2023 AMTA Arthur Flagler Fultz Award for their electronic health record (EHR) study, “National Outcomes Measurement for Music Therapy (NOM-MT) in Acute Healthcare Settings: Phase 1 – A Descriptive Analysis of One Year of Music Therapy Services in a Pediatric and Adult Hospital.” This is the premier music therapy research award given by the American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) in the United States.

“What’s also exciting about this project are the partnerships,” said Dr. Meadows. “Helen has decades of experience working with premature infants and I’ve worked in adult oncology (12 years), so we bring different knowledge and experience of work in medical settings. We partner with Cleveland Clinic (Dr. Bates and Dr. Gallagher) and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital (Dr. Harmon), and the music therapists there, who are really outstanding clinicians and researchers. Finally, we have two outside partners with expertise in data analysis (Dr. Demeril) and healthcare policy (Dr. Frascella) with knowledge and skills that really add to the project.”

This project serves as phase 1 of a larger study (phase 2), where the researchers will collaborate with 10 hospitals (5 pediatric and 5 adult), with the intention of gathering data on 50,000 patients who have received music therapy services during hospitalization.