An Exciting Day

By Patricia Flatley Brennan.

Today is an exciting day for Project HealthDesign as we launch the second round of the project with five new grantees. Building on our initial success, where we created a broader vision of PHRs that meet people’s needs by using technologies that people already rely on as part of their daily lives, we are now exploring practical ways to capture and integrate patient-recorded observations of daily living (ODLs) into the clinical care process.

Using ODLs to inform care
Our premise is that ODLs can help unlock information that is typically not part of the clinical experience – but that providers and patients absolutely need to be talking about. To help us test this with real people and real providers, we have selected five outstanding grantee teams for an intensive two-year demonstration projects to test whether and how information – such as the stress levels of caregivers of premature infants and medication or cooking routines of seniors at risk of cognitive decline – can be collected, interpreted and acted upon by patients and clinicians in real-world clinical settings. 

Over the next two years, the teams will forge partnerships with actual patients and providers in their communities and share experiences about how to:

1. Identify, capture and store several types of ODLs for their target patient population;
2. Analyze and interpret ODL data to extract clinically useful information;
3. Use this information to provide feedback to patients so that they can better manage their conditions and improve their health;
4. Enable patients to share this information with their doctors, nurses and other members of their care team;
5. Present the information to clinicians in ways that they can easily integrate into their clinical work flow without adding substantial burden to clinicians; and
6. Identify and explain opportunities and challenges associated with this overall approach to policymakers and clinical leaders.

We hope you’ll join us for an incredible journey
These teams were selected in a highly competitive grant process from nearly 150 initial applications, and we are elated to have them aboard for the second round of our work. Through this blog and other channels, we will be communicating early and often to let you know what we are up to and how things are going – even in those messy times when we are still trying to figure it all out. As you watch things unfold, please consider yourself a part of our process and let us know what you think. Commenting on this blog is a great way to start.