Understanding User Needs and Context to Inform Consumer Health Information Technology (IT) Design (R01) | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The grant opportunity "Understanding User Needs and Context to Inform Consumer Health Information Technology (IT) Design (R01)" (Funding Opportunity Number PA 11-199) is a discretionary research grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) focused on strengthening the basic evidence base behind consumer-facing health IT. It uses the NIH-style R01 mechanism, signaling that AHRQ is looking for substantial, multi-year research projects that can produce durable findings rather than small pilots. The core aim is to generate practical, research-backed knowledge about how people actually manage their personal health information (often referred to as personal health information management, or PHIM), and to translate those insights into design principles that make consumer health IT tools more usable and useful in real life.

The motivation behind the program is the rapid growth of consumer health IT products over the prior decade, including apps and tools intended to help people store, track, retrieve, share, and make sense of health information. Despite the explosion of tools, the funding announcement highlights a persistent gap: individuals are the end users of these technologies, yet there is still not enough foundational research on what end users truly need, what they do in practice, and why. AHRQ points to the fact that other industries have improved product utility by applying user-centered design principles grounded in a deep understanding of user needs and the context of use. This FOA is essentially an attempt to bring that same rigor to consumer health IT by supporting studies that connect design decisions to the lived reality of patients, families, and other consumers managing health information across many situations.

A central theme is that PHIM does not happen in a vacuum. The FOA emphasizes that PHIM practices and needs are shaped by contextual factors that can either enable or hinder effective management of health information. Examples called out include care settings (such as primary care, specialty care, hospital, home care), demographics, motivations, user capabilities and limitations, informal caregiving networks (family members or friends who help manage care), level of technology sophistication, and access to the internet. In practice, this means AHRQ is interested in research that goes beyond asking users what features they like. Instead, the agency is pushing for deeper investigation into workflows, constraints, and tradeoffs people face when dealing with medications, appointments, test results, insurance information, chronic disease monitoring, and communication with clinicians or caregivers. The intent is to explain not just what people do, but what drives those behaviors and how designs can better support them across diverse populations.

The announcement frames the broader outcome as bridging a "chasm" between consumer health IT designers and the people who use these tools. By bolstering basic research on PHIM needs, goals, and context, funded projects are expected to produce findings that designers and developers can apply directly, such as evidence-informed design principles, user requirements grounded in real-world contexts, or frameworks that account for barriers like limited digital literacy, disability-related access issues, fragmented care, and uneven connectivity. While the FOA text provided does not list specific required methodologies, its emphasis on context and heterogeneous users implies support for approaches like user-centered design research, observational and field studies, qualitative and mixed-methods work, human factors studies, and other rigorous methods that can uncover how health information is created, organized, shared, and acted upon over time.

Administratively, this opportunity is categorized under the health funding activity area and is associated with CFDA 93.226 (Research on Healthcare Costs, Quality and Outcomes). There is no cost sharing or matching requirement. The award ceiling is listed as $500,000. Key dates provided include a posted date and creation date of April 8, 2011, with an original and current closing date of July 5, 2014, and an archive date of August 5, 2014, indicating that this particular announcement is no longer active but remains a useful reference point for the type of work AHRQ sought to support.

Eligibility is broad and includes state governments, county governments, city or township governments, public and state-controlled institutions of higher education, private institutions of higher education, federally recognized Native American tribal governments, and other Native American tribal organizations. The notice also indicates that other eligible applicants include eligible agencies of the federal government, which expands the set of potential applicants beyond typical academic institutions. Contact information in the source data points applicants having trouble accessing or linking to the electronic announcement to the NIH Office of Extramural Research webmaster.

In plain terms, the opportunity funded rigorous research designed to answer a practical question: what do real people need when they manage their health information, how do their circumstances shape those needs, and how can consumer health IT be designed around those realities rather than assumptions. The end goal is better-designed consumer health technologies that work for a wide range of users, including those facing common real-world barriers, ultimately supporting improved health information use and, by extension, better care experiences and outcomes.

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