April 5, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
Project HealthDesign, a partnership between two foundations, has awarded $300,000 in research grants to encourage the development of new tools to help patients.
The grants, which have been distributed to nine teams of researchers, will build on technology that has been devised by health-care institutions and companies to create personal health records — electronic files that bring all of a patient’s medical records together in one place.
The goal of the grants is to find ways to make it easier for patients to use their medical data to help them manage their health care and treatment.
The real promise of personal health records isn’t in the information itself, but the actions the data enable patients to take, says Stephen Downs, a senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in Princeton, N.J., which is supporting the project.
“It would be a great thing if you had an accurate, up-to-date, comprehensive list of all the medications that you’re currently taking,” he says. “On the other hand, having something that drew on that information, that reminded you when to take your pills and when not to take your pills, would probably be more valuable.”
California HealthCare Foundation, in Oakland, has also put money toward the effort.
Projects the research teams are working on include software and other tools to help patients adhere to their treatment regimens for diabetes and transmit data such as blood-pressure readings to their doctors.
For more information: Go to http://www.projecthealthdesign.org.
