October 10, 2003
Grant Awarded to Evaluate Effectiveness of EHealth Technologies
Seattle, WA — Seeking to realize the full potential of the emerging field of eHealth — the use of interactive technologies to improve health behavior and disease management –the University of Washington School of Medicine is one of 18 sites to have been awarded a grant by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) through its Health e-Technologies Initiative national program. As part of this grant, Harborview Medical Center faculty from the University of Washington School of Medicine, will be involved in a study titled, “Randomized Controlled Trial of Diabetes Disease Management Over the Internet.”
“This grant will allow us to study how the Internet can be used as a disease management tool for African-American patients who suffer from diabetes,” said lead investigator Dr. Harold Goldberg, Division of General Internal Medicine at Harborview Medical Center, and Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington. “As previous studies suggest — programs that enhance disease knowledge by providing immediate and ongoing feedback — have the greatest likelihood of enhancing patients’ ability to manage their disease.”
The 30-month grant period begins with preparation of the software application module comprising six Web sites. The next phase of the study involves recruiting about 100 participants from the Adult Medicine outpatient clinic at Harborview. Individual patients will be followed for one year, beginning in April 2004. The aim of the study is to compare usual care versus collaborative chronic disease management over the Internet among disadvantaged African Americans with type 2 diabetes. Diabetes prevalence among adult blacks in Seattle/King County is 2.6 times the rate in whites, and the death rate is 3.7 times higher. The study will allow patients from home to:
The specific aims of the “Randomized Controlled Trial of Diabetes Disease Management Over the Internet” study at Harborview are to determine the effect of case-managed, Web-based diabetes care and use interviews to identify any barriers or enablers the Internet poses.
The number of health care consumers and providers using eHealth applications, particularly the Internet, to seek health information and communicate with others is rapidly increasing. According to the Boston Consulting Group, 80% of the 140 million adults who are online in the United States have used the Internet to look for health information and 96% of all physicians used Internet technology in 2002. In addition to using the Internet to enable and improve health and health care services, technologies such as interactive TV, interactive voice response systems, kiosks, personal digital assistants (PDAs), CD-ROMs, and DVD-ROMs can also be characterized as eHealth applications.
The Health e-Technologies Initiative national program office will provide the evidence base and knowledge required to build better eHealth programs. A resource and communication center of tools and materials to help translate the research into practice is housed at the program’s Web site: www.hetinitiative.org.
Other research members of the eHealth study at Harborview include: Dr. Daniel Lessler (co-principal investigator, Ambulatory Care Services, Harborview and UW associate professor of medicine); Dr. Irl Hirsch, (co-investigator, UW professor of medicine and director of the UW Diabetes Care Center); Dr. Allen Cheadle (co-investigator, UW research professor of Health Services); Dr. Alton Hart (co-investigator, acting instructor of UW medicine); Dr. James Ralston (co-investigator, National Service Research Award Fellow); Theresa O’Young (clinical pharmacist, Harborview); Kathleen Mertens (nurse and manager of Patient Education at Harborview); Mary Mullen (project coordinator) Harborview); and Michael Uretz (systems analyst, UW).
The list of grantees includes: Baylor College of Medicine, Boston Medical Center, Carnegie Mellon University, John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Kansas University Medical Center, MedStar Research Institute, Stanford University, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, UCLA School of Medicine, University of Washington, HealthMedia, Inc., The Medstat Group (a business of the Thompson Corporation), The Pennsylvania State University, The Research Foundation of SUNY, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California San Francisco.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, based in Princeton, N.J., is the nation’s largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to health and health care.
Harborview Medical Center is the Level I trauma center serving patients from Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho. Owned by King County and managed by the University of Washington, the medical center has long served as the “safety-net provider” for the underserved as well as providing specialty care to those critically injured.
