Project HealthDesign: Rethinking the Power and Potential of Personal Health Records, a national program run by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) announced that it is fielding applications for grant recipients who will work as part of a team to help patients and physicians better manage chronic diseases through "observations of daily living" (ODLs). ODLs include health data from everyday life like meals, sleep, exercise levels, pain episodes and moods. The program aims to find innovative ways to collect, interpret and integrate this information into the clinical care process.

Total grants for the project add up to $2.4 million for as many as five grantee teams willing to work on demonstration projects over the next two years. Each team can receive up to $480,000. Teams will works closely with patients and clincians in different care settings. The national program's office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will oversee the teams' progress.

Project HealthDesign launched in 2006 with a similar program, as a result nine multidisciplinary teams supported by the first round of funding demonstrated mobile phone enabled medication reminder systems for children with cystic fibrosis as well as a personal digital assistant that collects and supports paint and activity data. The key takeaway from the last round of innovation projects, reportedly, was that grantees learned patients want to have more participation in their care regimen but they also want the technologies involved to become a seamless part of their daily routine. The patients also placed a high importance on the ability to share these observations of daily living with their physicians and caregivers through their PHR since the information is not typically covered in traditional medical records.

This time around the initiative aims to give the teams two years to work with clinical partners and patients with two or more chronic conditions to:

Identify, capture and store several types of ODLs for their target patient population;

Analyze and interpret ODL data to extract clinically useful information;

Use this info to provide feedback to patients so they better manage their conditions;

Enable patients to share this information with their doctors, nurses and other members of their care team;

Present the information to clinicians in ways that they can easily integrate into their clinical work flow; and

Identify and explain opportunities and challenges associated with this overall approach to policymakers and clinical leaders.

Proposals are due by June 3 and applicants can contract the program's organizers at info AT projecthealthdesign DOT org. For more information on The Project HealthDesign call for proposals, take a look at the foundation's site here.