The Focus of Project HealthDesigns’ New Round of PHR Grants

Posted April 8, 2009 by Lygeia Ricciardi

As you may have seen, today Project HealthDesign announced a call for proposals for its second round of grants related to the development of personal health records (PHRs)—making $2.4 million available for several grants of up to $480,000 each.

What’s different about this round from the previous one? A key point is the explicit emphasis on capturing and integrating consumers’ (or patients') observations of daily living (ODLs) into a PHR and then—taking the idea a step further—directly into the workflow of their health care providers.

The ODLs focus is based on input from patients in the previous round of Project HealthDesign grants. Project leaders say one of the key learnings from the initial phase was the importance that patients placed on collecting and sharing data that are not typically part of the traditional medical record, but rather come from everyday life.

Steve Downs, who oversees the Project HealthDesign program on behalf of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, describes it this way: “We routinely saw people gather data on diet, exercise, sleep patterns, pain levels and many activities that give us a more accurate, meaningful picture of how people feel, day in, day out. This is powerful information that could help clinicians understand their patients better, understand how a treatment is working and adjust the treatment accordingly. We’re at a time when the technology has advanced enough that we can contemplate real breakthroughs in how to work with patients that suffer from chronic diseases.”

Project HealthDesign Director Patti Brennan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison further illuminates the ODLs focus: “The first round of Project HealthDesign taught us that the needs of patients must be the primary drivers of technological innovation. When it comes to patients being active managers of their own health and health care, we learned that it’s not just important to record observations from the clinical experience; personal observations of health as we go about our daily lives are equally critical. Information about how you feel and what you experience on an ongoing basis needs to be easily integrated into clinical processes because these observations reveal trends that enable care to be vastly improved and tailored to patients’ realities. By allowing this type of information to be shared easily between patients and providers, we believe people will experience a different level of engagement with their health and the health care system. The result might well be better patient-provider relationships and better clinical outcomes.”

If all goes well in the second round of funding, the project may see these kinds of outcomes and will no doubt learn other unexpected and valuable lessons from patients along the way. For-profit and non-profit entities may apply for grants. Initial (brief) proposals are due on June 3, 2009. For details and more information, see the full call for proposals. And feel free to submit any questions or observations you my have via this blog.  

Comments

[Will Ross]

I realize that the ODL focus in the next round of Project HealthDesign is a fully thought out and very much in motion, so please take the
following question as just some sort of random noise that is very much off topic. Today I read the HIMSS "Meaningful Use" discussion blog. There are only a dozen postings on the blog, so it's still possible to take in the entire discussion. One of
the common themes on the HIMSS blog is the assumption that "meaningful use" will be accomplished by a physician using a CCHIT certified EHR to exchange health information to improve health care quality. What is unstated in the HIMSS comments, and the question
I want to pose here, is to ask if a PHR service can be the infomediary handling the exchange of data between providers? I realize the answer is yes, but I'm posing the question here because the interoperability discussion on the HIMSS blog is so "EHR-centric".

[Lygeia Ricciardi]

Hi Will --

Thanks for your comment. I agree that the "meaningful use" discussions thus far--in places other than the HIMSS blog, too--are very EHR and healthcare provider centric. I am definitely in favor of bringing in more of a patient emphasis, which may mean making sure patients have access to and the ability to contribute to their doctors' EHRs--actually using the PHR as a conduit among PHRs is another option I hadn't thought of. What do others think of this idea?