Posted June 10, 2009 by Patti Brennan
This June third, Project HealthDesign reached another milestone with the receipt of 145 Brief Proposals for its second round. Not only did it mark the start of the new phase for the project, but it also ushered in a plethora of intriguing, exciting projects exploring how better understanding of observations in daily living (ODLs) could improve the health and health care of individuals. During the review process we can’t reveal too much about the proposals under consideration, but here we provide you with a glimpse of what is to come.
Proposals described innovative ways to help a wide
variety of patients and their family caregivers better understand, and manage,
problems like pain, diabetes,
hypertension, spina bifida, hydrocephalus, rheumatoid arthritis and intimate partner violence. Creative technical solutions were
proposed to address the needs of those who are elderly, sensory-impaired or of
limited health literacy. Target
populations included parents of low birthweight infants, teens transitioning to
college and people in vulnerable situations, such at those who had just been
discharged from the hospital, recently moved away from home, or lived in an
area with few or no medical facilities or providers.
The nature of the ODLs proposed ranged from
familiar patient-provided information (appetites, sleep adequacy, etc) to those
reflecting a high degree of understanding of patients and their health
experiences. Novel ODLs included
behaviors, emotions, sensations and environmental characteristics.
You may recall that we challenged the applicants to
employ a 3-part technical architecture--with data capture in the everyday
life of the individual, data storage on a third party platform like Microsoft’s
HealthVault or GoogleHealth, and data interpretation and presentation back to
the clinician and the patient. Along with standard data capture, teams proposed
utilizing photos, environmental sensors, gait analysis, grocery store
transactions and vocal recording.
Almost one-third of the projects proposed using Web 2.0 tools, including
social networking tools, Twitter and SMS. Platform use was almost evenly split between Health Vault and
GoogleHealth. In addition to
innovations like dashboard presentations, applicants proposed using electronic
messaging, graphs and charts, and standard reports as ways to present
integrated views on the ODLs.
Submissions came predominantly from the Northeast,
with most submissions from Massachusetts, California, and New York. More than half of the proposals came
from educational institutions, sometimes because the project addressed the
health needs of students and sometimes because the educational institution
served as the work site of the lead proposer. The second most common organizational type was medical
centers and hospitals. A smaller
but critical set of proposals came from the private sector, split between for
profit and non-profit companies.
This round brought in almost a dozen proposals with nurses as primary
investigators, more than the first round.
With
the breadth, range and ingenuity brought forward by teams who submitted brief
proposals, Project HealthDesign is looking forward to the coming round and the
future of capturing and utilizing ODLs in patient care. Our National Advisory Committee will
spend the next several weeks evaluating these brief proposals; we’ll select up
to 25 by July 20th and invite them each to prepare a full
proposal. We will announce the
final list of grantees by December 1, 2009.
Congratulations
to all 145 teams who submitted proposals–the creativity and vision of the
ideas presented here portends a bright and exciting future for PHRs and the
health of the people who use them!
Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD, is the Director of Project Health Design.
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