In its first round of funding, the Center for Health Research Center and CITRIS are pleased to award three Health Information Technology (HIT) Grants.
Impoverished regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa are increasingly being overwhelmed by a shortage of trained physicians in their fight to provide effective health care. In this project, Eric Brewer (Computer Science, brewer@cs.berkeley.edu) and his team will develop applications for cell phones to enable medical data collection and decision support systems for non-physician healthcare workers, both at clinics and in the field, as a cost-effective means to reduce the workload of specially trained but scarce physicians. The data collected will be made available for real time analysis for more effective health policy decisions. While they will initially focus on applications to manage Anti-Retroviral Treatment (ART) for HIV patients, over time they expect to develop applications for a wide range of problems such as diabetes which are customarily seen by non-physical health workers as a means to improve quality of care being provided across the entire healthcare network.
The telecom research community has devoted substantial attention to developing powerful technologies that eliminate many of the barriers to effective knowledge sharing within and between organizations. In the wireless healthcare sector, communication systems are used to provide healthcare when distance separates the participants. These developments could revolutionize medical care and decrease health inequities. For example, rural patients may gain access to specialized services outside of their communities, and fewer errors may arise in hospitals as information sharing across departments becomes instantaneous. However, many advanced technologies have been less widely adopted and less effectively utilized than their potential seems to merit. Several barriers to wireless technology adoption exist, and even once a technology is adopted there is no guarantee that it will prove effective at enhancing quality, lowering error rates, or decreasing costs. Karlene Roberts, (Business, Organizational Behavior, karlene@haas.berkeley.edu) and her research team will seek to address the lack of rigorous research on telehealth technology through qualitative research on the adoption and implementation of wireless telehealth projects at several hospital systems.
Information and computer technology to provide assisted living and remote health care monitoring can improve the quality of life and extend the ability to live at home for elderly and other citizens by facilitating better home based rehabilitation and health monitoring and support to emerging mobile lifestyles providing independent living. In this project, Shankar Sastry (EECS, Sastry@eecs.berkeley.edu) and his research team will work to create a suite of applications and devices that provide for a modular, integrated, scalable system of integrated services. The integrated solutions created will provide the necessary connection to intelligent wireless sensor networks and pervasive home technologies which together are the enabling technological environment for real long term health monitoring and in general for supporting elder citizens in living the way they choose. Thus the new technology will have substantial social impact as well. It will make possible real home health care applications due to ubiquitous and on demand capability of measurement. The power to provide an on demand, direct link between a doctor and patient’s physiological measurement would greatly enhance their quality of life.
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