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NIH Challenge Awards in Health
and Science Research

01-TW-102* Improving health through ICT/mobile technologies: enhancing patient compliance.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) applications hold the prospect of dramatically improving patients’ treatment compliance/adherence and their health at a greatly reduced cost. To realize this potential, implementation research is required to identify behavior modification strategies at all levels (patient, provider and institutions), which will yield the most effective treatment outcomes using these technologies.

Purpose:

The overarching objective of this challenge grant is to support the study of feasible and scalable approaches to using ICT, for example, the use of mobile phone technologies, to enhance patient compliance/adherence to evidence-based curative and preventive interventions in low-resource settings. While this research may be carried out in the U.S., the Fogarty Center is particularly interested in its adaptation and adoption in low-resource settings globally.

For the purposes of this challenge grant program, implementation research is defined as the scientific study of methods to promote the integration of research findings and evidence-based interventions into practice. It seeks to understand the behavior of healthcare professionals and support staff, and healthcare consumers and their families and social networks in context as key variables in the sustainable uptake, adoption, and implementation of evidence-based interventions. It is multi- and trans-disciplinary. For these studies some relevant fields that might be included are: information and communication science as well as technology development, economics, individual and systems-level behavioral change, anthropology, learning theory, and marketing.

Priority topics:

Topics and approaches chosen by applicants should allow for significant accomplishments in the 2 years of funding that are available under this mechanism. Priority topics include, but are not limited to:

• Analysis of factors influencing the creation, packaging, transmission and reception of evidence-based interventions through ICT, affecting patient compliance/adherence. These factors can include, but are not limited to behavioral, psychological and socio-cultural issues. We encourage conducting comprehensive formative research including social network analysis, system and individual level barriers analysis prior to implementing the research effort.



• Implementation research on the use of ICT to adopt and integrate evidence-based health interventions and change practice patterns within specific settings to enhance patient compliance/adherence. We encourage studies in which effectiveness of an ICT approach is tested in a real-world situation. We encourage the development and use of intermediate and end-point health outcomes measures and the feasibility and scalability of the tested implementation strategy.

Contact:

Xingzhu Liu, M.D., Ph.D.
Program Officer
Division of International Training and Research
Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health
Building 31, Room B2C39, 31 Center Drive, MSC 2220
Bethesda, MD 20892-2220 USA
Phone: 301-496-1653
Fax: 301-402-0779
liuxing@mail.nih.gov

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