mHealth Evidence: Call for Whitepapers

Mobile health (mHealth) has the potential to simultaneously reduce the cost of health care and improve our health by encouraging healthy behaviors, providing continuous monitoring to prevent or reduce health problems, reducing acute health care visits, and providing personalized, real-time intervention in the mobile environment. However, traditional methods of evaluation needed to address efficacy and safety in mHealth are not well aligned to the pace of technological development.

 To address this need, we’ve formed a partnership with the McKesson Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research at NIH. As part of this partnership, we are issuing a call for white papers on alternative research designs to the traditional randomized control trial that could be applied to mHealth intervention research or in analyses of rich longitudinal data sets that could be applied to analyzing the data obtained from mHealth applications.

Authors of accepted whitepapers will be invited to attend the August 2011 mHealth Evidence Meeting in Bethesda, MD, which will bring together individuals with diverse expertise in data analysis and experimental design to identify innovative methods that can accelerate the evaluation of the efficacy and safety of mHealth technologies. Travel will be reimbursed by the event’s sponsors. Results from the workshop will be used to define the research agenda for evaluation of mobile health technology.

A couple of important dates to keep in mind:

Deadline for submission: May 27 (11:59 EST)

Notification of Invitation: June 10