Principal Investigator
Laura Esserman, M.D., M.B.A.
Director
University of California, San Francisco
Center of Excellence for Breast Cancer Care
San Francisco, CA

Project Title and Description:
A Customized Care Plan for Breast Cancer Patients*

Principal Investigator:
George Ferguson, Ph.D.
Research Scientist
Department of Computer Science
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY

Project Title and Description:
Personal Health Management Assistant

The University of Rochester team is designing a computerized “conversational assistant” to provide patients with heart disease with a “daily check-up.” Through a collaborative conversation, using speech and/or text chat, the system will help the patient share information relevant to their condition. The computer will then interpret how they are doing each day, personalize treatment recommendations based on established guidelines for heart failure patients, and collect longitudinal data to share with patients and their doctors. In building their prototype the team will be able to evaluate their vision of a personal assistant that utilizes speech recognition, natural language understanding, conversational interaction, and knowledge-based task management. The team will be testing the ability to upload and download interview data through the webservices interface to/from the PHD repository to document interview data and to inform subsequent interviews. They will also contribute to an initial evaluation of the adequacy of data structure for capturing observations of daily living.

Principal Investigator:
Stephanie Fonda, Ph.D.
Senior Research Scientist
TRUE Research Foundation
Washington, DC

Project Title and Description:
Personal Health Application for Diabetes Self-Management 

TRUE Research Foundation and the Diabetes Institute at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (formerly Joslin Diabetes Institute) is designing a personal health application (PHA) to assist with the main components of diabetes self-management. The PHA will analyze, summarize, display, and make individualized recommendations on: nutrition/dietary data, daily physical activity data, the balance between nutrition and physical activity, prescribed medications, continuous blood glucose data, and self-reported emotional state. The PHA will also enable consumers to conduct “what if” analyses, which will predict the results of choices they might be considering (such the metabolic effects of particular meals). To accomplish these functions, the TRUE team will develop an analysis and recommendations rules engine that consumers will interface with via gadgets within iGoogle. Unlike other PHD teams that are developing PHA devices, TRUE’s rules engines may be embedded in many platforms. For this effort, the team will make use of the PHD data model and services for accessing (identity/security) and storing observations of daily living, certain elements of calendaring, and identity management. In their prototype testing, the team will examine how the PHD data model and services work with presenting data via gadgets within iGoogle. Specifically, their testing will be concerned with issues such as whether the flow of data between source and gadgets is easy and reliable, whether calculations using data from the PHD data model are easy to perform and accurate, whether it is easy and accurate to convert data from the PHD data model into the gadget’s graphical interfaces, and whether the large volume of health data that this PHA will require will be accessible at all times.

Principal Investigator:
James Ralston, MD, MPH
Assistant Investigator, The Center for Health Studies
Group Health Cooperative
University of Washington
Seattle, WA

Project Title and Description:
Chronic Disease Medication Management Between Office Visits

In an effort to shift the organization of healthcare towards patients’ needs, the team from the University of Washington is designing a PHR system that allows people with diabetes to record their blood glucose levels, blood pressure, food intake and exercise levels and quickly upload these readings wirelessly over a cell phone to their health care provider. Providers review the information and sync it with the patient’s electronic medical record, providing feedback and counsel as needed. In testing the concept of a health record shared between patients and healthcare providers the team will develop and test web-based application with extension onto a cell phone. An integration ware-house serves as data repository and reporting engine. The team will partner with colleagues at the Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine (NST) in Tromso, Norway and with Sujansky & Associates to test interoperability of the common platform for mobile phone self-monitoring and user feedback of blood glucose levels. The collaborators will demonstrate the utility of the common platform for capturing and sharing person-level data.

Principal Investigator:
Kevin Johnson, M.D., M.S.
Associate Professor
Department of Biomedical Informatics
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
Nashville, TN

Project Title and Description:
My-Medi-Health: A Vision for a Child-focused Personal Medication Management System

The team at Vanderbilt University is developing a Personal Health Application (PHA) for children with cystic fibrosis and their caretakers – both at home and in schools – to track medications, alert parents when doses have been taken, manage refills, and more. Team members are developing a medication management PHA which can wear a variety of age-appropriate “skins” to work with the PHR. The device reminds kids to take medications at established intervals and can notify parents, school personnel and others if there is no response to a reminder. The team will test their device-independent interface for child-centered medication management application that enables 2-way communication between their PHA, the PHR and other recipients by conducting pilot tests with kids obtaining information on acceptability of the concept as well as evaluate the skins. The team will also construct and test messaging and social filtering applets. Working with Tolven Inc., the Vanderbilt and Colorado teams will build a shared medication list and test it in different applications. Included in the working model of a common platform for medication management are the medication list, scheduling, and documentation functions; the working model will link to reminder and alert functions. They are contracting with Thomson Healthcare for standardized patient medication information.

Principal Investigator:
Roger Luckmann, M.D., M.P.H.
Associate Professor
Department of Family Medicine and Community Health
University of Massachusetts Medical School
Worcester, MA

Project Title and Description:
Supporting Patient and Provider Management of Chronic Pain with PDA Applications Linked to Personal Health Records

The University of Massachusetts Medical School team is designing a personal health application (PHA) to help patients document their daily pain experiences and physical activities. The application, an electronic diary, will support collection of self-reported pain and activity data on a handheld device and eventually will provide both patients and their health care providers with a menu of options for analyzing and displaying this data. To facilitate rapid completion of diary entries throughout the day, a touch screen device will be used. Response options to diary queries will be customized to include only responses relevant to each individual user. The team will engage target patients through focus groups to obtain input on content, function, UI design and hardware preferences. In addition, they will field test a working prototype to assess ease-of-use and feasibility of data collection every 2 hours throughout the day. The team will be testing the adequacy of the Common Platform specification of observations of daily living by transferring pain and activity data from the mobile device to the Common Platform database. They will also test the effectiveness of Common Platform utilities for accessing and sharing data with other patients and providers. The team will evaluate the feasibility of using existing web services for accessing, analyzing and displaying pain and activity data in the Common Platform database.

Principal Investigator:
Barbara Leah Massoudi, Ph.D., M.P.H.
Senior Research Health Scientist
Research Triangle Institute
Atlanta, GA

Principal Investigator:
Christy Sandborg, MD
Professor and Chief, Pediatric Rheumatology
Chief of Staff
Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital
Stanford University School of Medicine

Project Title and Description:
Living Profiles: Transmedia Personal Health Record Systems for Young Adults 

Stanford University (formerly the Art Center College of Design) is developing a Personal Health Application (PHA) to help adolescents with chronic illnesses transition from pediatric to the adult care system, in which these young patients will assume greater responsibility for their health and their personal health information. The project team is working on an aggregate set of tools that gathers and integrates discrete data. By tapping into exhibited teen behavior such as texting and emotional connectivity through music, the tools seamlessly incorporate into their every day world improving communication with their caregivers. In testing the team’s vision of integrating data streams into graphical presentation the team will prototype the physician teen exchange, providing feedback to the teen about the relationship between their behavior and state of health. They will build a customizable user interface consistent with PHD specifications for observations of daily living and calendaring with data flows including mood, medication reminders, and visual representations.

Principal Investigator:
Stephen Eisenhard Ross, M.D.
Associate Professor
Division of General Internal Medicine
University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center
Aurora, CO

Project Title and Description:
Assisting Older Adults with Transitions of Care

The team at the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center is developing a portable touch-screen computer that older patients or their caregivers could receive upon hospital discharge.  The tablet-sized PC will help patients track and organize medications allowing them to coordinate their medication lists with their doctors.  Additional applications will assist in scheduling prescriptions, ordering refills, preparing for visits and more. The team seeks to push the boundaries in ambient computing with older adults and the generation of medication lists utilizing embedded information (barcodes).   They also wish to establish a semantic link between the medication list and an authoritative source of information such as Medline Plus. The team will prototype the application through rapid iteration testing and evaluation (RITE) methods utilizing tools such as storyboarding, paper testing of key features such as the tablet and scanner, and medication reconciliation and scheduling.  Working with Tolven Inc., the Colorado and Vanderbilt teams will build a shared medication list and test it in different applications. Included in the working model of a common platform for medication management are the medication list, scheduling, documentation, reminder and alert functions. They are contracting with Thomson Healthcare for standardized patient medication information.