Telehealth Technologies Development

The summary for the Telehealth Technologies Development grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the National Institutes of Health, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

Telehealth Technologies Development: The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) invites applications for NIH Research Project Grant (R01) awards to support interdisciplinary basic research or Exploratory/Developmental Grant (R21) awards to support design and development of novel telehealth instrumentation or technologies that can be applied to a broad spectrum of disorders and diseases. There is also a parallel Program Announcement (PA) for Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) award on this topic PA- 03-030 (http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PA-03-030.html). Telehealth is defined by the Federal Communications Commission and by the DHHS Office of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention as "the use of communications technologies to provide and support health care at a distance. Examples include the use of communications to provide patient treatment, often via still images or video, and the exchange and distribution of public health information." Issues amenable to technical solution arise in the diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up with a patient at a distance. The technical feasibility of telehealth applications has been well demonstrated for several specific applications in the past (as reported in the NIH Telemedicine Symposium March 2001, http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/telesymp.html). The current need is to generalize remote access technology to be adaptable to a broad range of telehealth applications, to develop mechanisms in which the technology can be integrated seamlessly into the routine of the provider and the patient, and to develop technology for standardizing and incorporating state-of-the-art security protocols for verifying user identities and preserving patient confidentiality. This Request for Applications (RFA) is intended to support an integrated approach on the part of biomedical engineers or imaging scientists with medical care professionals.