Five grantee teams have been selected as part of Project HealthDesign's national program that explores how personal health records can be used to capture and integrate patient-recorded observations of daily living (ODL) into clinical care.
The five teams are part of phase two of the project and will be involved in two-year demonstrations to test the ability of technology to collect feedback from patients with chronic diseases and integrate it into the clinical care process.
The five teams are:
- Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh is developing and evaluating new technology that monitors the routine of older individuals who have arthritis and are at risk for cognitive decline, providing data for long-term functional assessment and treatment.
- RTI International in North Carolina and Virginia Commonwealth University are designing an application for patients with asthma and depression to provide a clearer picture of their health in everyday life for treatment and self-monitoring.
- San Francisco State University is examining the potential of collecting ODLs via smartphones for low-income teens that are simultaneously managing obesity and depression.
- The University of California, Berkeley in partnership with The Healthy Communities Foundation and the University of California, San Francisco will help young adults who suffer from Crohn's disease create visual narratives of their condition and treatment to provide concrete feedback to providers about how they feel from day to day.
- University of California, Irvine and Charles Drew University are collecting information from pre-term low birth weight infants and their primary caregivers to allow them to more easily interface with their health care providers to improve care and communication.
"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 into the clinical care process," said Patricia Flatley Brennan, national program director, for Project HealthDesign.
In the initial phase of Project HealthDesign, nine multidisciplinary teams worked over 18 months to design a user-centered PHR application that operated on a common technology platform. The teams collected and shared so-called ODL in patients, including sleep, diet, exercise, mood and adherence to medication regimens, using a variety of technologies, including computers, PDAs and cell phones.
"One of the key outcomes of this project was an increasing focus on collecting data that are not typically part of one's medical record but rather come from the flow of everyday life. In order to provide people with the actionable feedback they sought, PHR applications needed to collect these observations of daily living," said Stephen Downs, assistant vice president of health for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in a report the foundation released in June.
