VUMC Limited Submission Opportunity: "Personal Health Libraries for Consumers and Patients"; deadline is May 10
These instructions are for VUMC investigators. VU investigators should apply through InfoReady and address any questions to VU-LSO@vanderbilt.edu.
VUMC may nominate one candidate for the NIH National Library of Medicine R01 “Data Science Research: Personal Health Libraries for Consumers and Patients” (Clinical Trial Optional). The award provides up to $250,000 direct costs/year for a maximum of four years.
The National Library of Medicine seeks applications for novel informatics and data science approaches that can help individuals gather, manage and use data and information about their personal health. A goal of this program is to advance research and application by patients and the research community through broadly sharing the results via publication, and through open source mechanisms for data or resource sharing.
Considerations:
- Applicants must base their proposed work on an informed profile of the intended users, and, the work should be developed through interaction with the intended users. Applicants should plan to undertake one or more pilots to test their ideas with the intended user group.
- Applicants may propose new tools or extensions to the capabilities of existing open source tools such as personal health record systems, by adding new features or extending capabilities of the tool. In either case, scientific innovation is key. Applicants are encouraged to take advantage of freely available public information resources available from NLM and others, such as MedlinePlus, Genetics Home Reference, PUBMED Central, online courses and tutorials.
Eligible Projects:
Examples of suitable areas of development include, but are not limited to:
- Constructing a personal health library: informatics approaches that help a person gather different types of health data/information/knowledge into a single, searchable resource for personal use, including intelligent mapping tools for vocabulary used to describe elements of the library.
- Managing a personal health information library: novel informatics approaches that make it easy for an average user to expand or remove entries, make notes or corrections, including intelligent tools that alert the user to new information about topics covered in a personal health information library.
- Using a personal health library: data science and informatics approaches that make it easy to find and use the information, including visual tagging, text summarization, graphics translation, knowledge mapping, suggestions for tutorials, analytic and visualization techniques that make the information understandable based on characteristics of the individual user or group.
- Digital librarian/assistant for personal health library: data science and informatics approaches that bring machine intelligence to the management and use of a personal health information library through personalized alerts and suggestions, literacy aids, translators or other approaches, taking into account characteristics of the individual user or group.
Projects that propose the following outcomes would not be appropriate for this FOA:
- A tool that requires the user to purchase a commercial off-the-shelf product.
- An information resource that requires payment for access to information.
- A tool that supports management of only a single kind of health data or information.
- An approach that does not allow the user to expand or update the contents.
- An approach that doesn't allow the user to update, annotate or add/delete data.
- An approach that limits the user's ability to share information from her/his personal health library with another person or organization.
Internal Application Process:
Anyone interested in being considered as one of VUMC’s nominees must submit the following (in a single PDF) to LSO@vanderbilt.edu by 5 p.m. on May 10.
- Brief research plan including summary budget (2 page max including budget);
- Statement of support from department chair/center director;
- NIH Biosketch
Please reference the program name in the subject line of the email. Any questions may be directed to LSO@vanderbilt.edu