New Project HealthDesign Grantees Tackle ODL Challenges

Today, Pioneer and Project HealthDesign announced the five new grantee teams 
selected in the program’s second round of funding.  They’ll be breaking new ground in testing ways that patient-generated observations of daily living (ODLs) can be collected, integrated in clinical care processes and, ultimately, organized for action to drive smarter heath decisions by both patients and providers.  Congratulations to the grantees, who rose to the top of an applicant pool numbering nearly 150 with their innovative ideas and robust approaches:

• Carnegie Mellon University
• RTI International and Virginia Commonwealth University
• San Francisco State University
• University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with Healthy Communities Foundation and University of California, San Francisco
• University of California, Irvine and Charles Drew University
  

The teams will be working with patient populations that are managing two or more chronic conditions to collect and store various health observations that arise in the course of their day to day lives.  A later technical challenge will be to figure out best ways to share meaningful signals from these ODLs with providers and integrate that data in to clinical work flows.  National Program Director Patti Brennan writes more about this on the Project HealthDesign blog.

The patient groups are compelling, and you can see how making sense of ODLs and being able to act on them can have a tremendous outcome on their health.  Patients can use technologies like smartphones and biomonitors to harness information that better equips them to manage their conditions and make decisions that hopefully allow them to experience better outcomes, day in and day out.  Providers will get a far fuller picture of the way health plays out for their patients and be able to act on more meaningful information than that typically collected in a periodic office visit conversation. 

For example, parents of low birth weight babies will use a specially designed mobile device, "FitBaby," to record ODLs such as the baby’s temperament, exercise, feeding and sleeping schedules, as well as the caregivers’ stress levels and attitude swings. Providing nearly real-time data to clinicians will help alert them to early signs of health problems, which is crucial in treating low birth weight infants.  Another team will help young adults who suffer from Chron’s disease create visual narratives of their condition and treatment to provide concrete feedback to providers about how they feel from day to day. Patients will track ODLs of physical symptoms like diarrhea, bleeding, and profound weight loss, along with more complex social and emotional observations.

The path is not entirely clear, and lots of questions will be raised along the way.  Which is why the grantees will be sharing their learnings, experiences, road blocks, questions and successes along the way, largely via the Project HealthDesign blog and Web site.  We want their progress to be an open path along which you follow and help to guide.  We’ll be sharing updates and hope you’ll check in often as well.