Princeton, N.J.-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has added members to its national advisory committee (NAC) that will lead the next phase of a national program that aims to promote the use of personal health records.
In the second phase of the initiative — entitled Project HealthDesign: Rethinking the Power and Potential of Personal Health Records — grantee teams will work closely with patients and providers across care settings to improve disease management by collecting, interpreting and integrating “observations of daily living” (ODLs) into the clinical care process, says the Foundation.
The committee is comprised of leaders in academia, technology, clinical practice and health and healthcare. Committee members, who were selected for a three-year term of service, include:
- Veenu Aulakh, M.S.P.H., Senior Program Officer, Better Chronic Disease Care, California HealthCare Foundation
- Susannah Fox, Associate Director, Digital Strategy, Pew Internet & American Life Project
- John D. Halamka, M.D., M.S., CIO, Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
- J. Daniell Hebert, CEO and Co-Founder, MOTO Development Group
- Carlos Roberto Jaén, M.D., Ph.D., Professor and Chairman, Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio
- Deven McGraw, J.D., M.P.H., L.L.M., Director, Health Privacy Project, Center for Democracy & Technology
As a part of their responsibilities, members will review submissions received in response to the program’s recent call for proposals, make recommendations on awards selections and provide RWJF with advice on overall program strategy, it says.
Launched in 2006, Project HealthDesign last fall presented a series of novel applications that could work in tandem with PHRs to help patients better manage their health. Nine multidisciplinary teams, supported through the program’s first round of funding, engaged in a user-centered design process to create a broad range of innovative IT tools that addressed specific but complex disease self-management tasks.
The program, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio and led by a national program office based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recently received proposals from 145 teams from across the U.S. The committee will spend the next several weeks evaluating these brief proposals, inviting up to 25 teams to prepare full proposals. The program will announce the final list of grantees by December 1, 2009.
For more information about Project HealthDesign, including the program’s new national advisory committee, visit www.projecthealthdesign.org.
