Project HealthDesign: A Platform for Innovation

Posted June 17, 2009 by Patti Brennan 

Last week, I blogged about the bright and exciting future for PHRs and the health of the people who use theme evidenced in the proposals submitted on June 3 for our second round of funding. Today, I have a unique opportunity to take the next steps towards that PHR vision, not only in announcing the final report from our nine grantees and their support teams, but also by fulfilling our promise to openly share our work products.

Back in 2006 our team launched the Project HealthDesign program with an audacious goal–stimulate innovation in personal health records by embracing a design process grounded in two principles:  make the patient the center of the design process; and, separate the data from the application. To underline the seriousness of our commitment to stimulate future development, we adopted a policy of wide-spread distribution for use of the tools and technologies built under this project through open source strategies.  

Beginning today, the final report from Project HealthDesign’s first round grantees and their downloadable work products are available for your viewing and use at Round 1 Projects and Products. The files contain the vision, design and code documents created by our grantees, as well as the code and documentation for using our common platform. The vision and design files represent a high level of innovative thinking inspired from an intense user design process. Included here are videos depicting project concepts, executable code, interview guides, software development strategies and publications and poster presentations. In addition there are archives of informational documents created by the ELSI team and our communications group. 

We have also provided the Common Platform software under an open-source license for interested  parties who wish to implement it in their local environments. This Common Platform, designed to meet the requirements of our first round grantees for storing and sharing personal health data, provides a web-services data repository that manages observations, medication lists, and access-control preferences.  We are interested in learning about your experiences in testing these products, and hope you will down load them, implement them and let us know how they worked for you.

Over the next several months, I encourage our followers to take some time to explore our first round materials. There are tools for all levels of sophistications and interests–ranging from code and code documentation to visual stories demonstrating the grantee applications. The products are available to you through open source or creative commons licenses that seek only to insure these products will remain available for use by the health IT community. We encourage you to look at these products, try them out and use them, and share your experiences with us and the community at large through our BLOG.

We hope the work products from Round 1 will inspire vision as well as provide tools to help foster innovation, as we seek to create better ways of managing the health of individuals and the community-at-large.  

Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD, is the Director of Project Health Design.