The Center for Technology and Aging (the Center) recently awarded $477,000 in grants to support the use of remote patient monitoring technologies. Now the Oakland, California organization dedicated to helping improve the quality of home- and community-based care for seniors has announced it will give away another half million.
The Center’s “Remote Patient Monitoring Diffusion Grants Program” is soliciting letters of intent from organizations that are interested in expanding use of remote patient monitoring technologies that help improve the health and safety of older adults.
Total funding available for this grant program is $500,000. Up to six grants will be awarded. Funded projects are expected to commence in July 2010.
In an official news release, the Center said it is interested in funding projects that aim to further disseminate proven remote patient monitoring technologies. “The three areas of remote patient monitoring that will be addressed in this program are chronic disease monitoring, post-acute care monitoring, and safety monitoring,” the statement explains. “Health care problems in these three areas are important, widespread, and potentially addressable by beneficial technologies.”
The statement goes on to describe the purpose of the program. “To encourage further use of remote patient monitoring technologies that:
- Reduce the use of emergency department and hospital services by older adults (60+ years old).
- Enable independent living and the ability to live in the setting of one’s choice.
- Lead to improvements in the cost and quality of care.
- Reduce the need for older adults to move to more intensive, higher-cost care settings.
- Reduce the burden on formal and informal caregivers.
- Work in the home, as well as long-term and post-acute care settings.
- Include monitoring devices for chronic conditions, post-acute care, and patient safety monitoring for wandering and falls.
In the first grant program, launched last year, the Center awarded $477,000 to five groups to help boost medication adherence among older patients with chronic conditions via technology and better care coordination. Recipients had to chip in with $520,000 in matching funds. Each grantee selected its own technology.
Caring Choices, a volunteer organization in Northern California, deployed Philips’ Medication Dispensing Service to four home-health and senior-housing agencies. The VA’s Central California Health Care System chose the Bosch Health Buddy monitoring system and related “smart” monitors and scales and is using them in five medically underserved counties. The Visiting Nurse Service of New York is expanding its EMR with its grant, as well as funding counseling support and enhancing its point-of-care medication algorithm technology.
Application instructions
Eligible organizations must be non-profit with a 501(c)(3) designation; local, state or federal government agencies; or universities and colleges with a 501(c)(3) designation. Also eligible are consortiums, including public/private and non-profit/for-profit collaborations.
A letter of intent, submitted online, must be received by the Center by 5:00 pm PST on March 12. Full proposals are due by April 30. (We know you were wondering, so we looked it up. Daylight Savings Time begins this year on March 14.) Successful applications will have a strategy for integrating the technology “into the fabric of state and national healthcare delivery and reimbursement systems,” the Center says.
California organizations favored
Total funding available for the Remote Patient Monitoring Diffusion Grants Program is $500,000. The Center says it expects to award five to six grants of up to $100,000 per grant for a period of 12-months.
Grantees must demonstrate a minimum of a 25% match in new direct funding. Projects will begin in July.
Between four and five of these grants must directly benefit older adults in California, while one or two may benefit older adults in other regions of the U.S. The Center is looking for organizations that want to expand usage of existing technologies that have shown the ability to reduce the need for high-acuity care for seniors with chronic conditions.
Center director David Lindeman wrote, “One of the most important means of maintaining older adults’ independence and maximizing their functional capacity is the ability for caregivers, clinicians and family members to monitor vital signs or a person’s whereabouts from a distance. Thankfully, many effective tools and technologies already exist to greatly reduce these problems. We want to see the use of these technologies expand more quickly across the U.S.”
