Starting in 2006, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation sponsored Project HealthDesign, an interdisciplinary program whose goal was to spark innovation in personal health technology. The program advances a vision of personal health records (PHRs) as springboards for action and improved health decision-making. The emphasis was on patient-centered design of solutions to healthcare problems using the then-new notion of personal health records (PHRs) together with the web and mobile technologies that were on their way to being ubiquitous.

This video was produced by Project HealthDesign with the collaboration of the UR Center for Future Health team. It is not technical, but rather serves to illustrate the vision of what a personal assistant might do for a patient with a chronic condition, such as heart failure. We did go on to develop a prototype of such a system--check out the next video.

Credits: Horwitz: patient-centered design and needs assessment; Quinn: cardiac care expertise; Ferguson: system design and development, project leadership and management.