The Digital Health R&D (DHRD) Interagency Working Group (IWG) aimed at improving the health of Americans by advancing technologies that support personalized health screening, monitoring, diagnosis, and treatment; disease prevention; emergency response; broad access to healthcare information and resources; and building and sustaining a diverse and highly skilled health IT workforce. The DHRD IWG reports investments across several Program Component Areas.
Overview
The Digital Health R&D (DHRD) Interagency Working Group was formed in 2010 as the Health Information Technology R&D IWG to coordinate Federal R&D for improving medical, functional, and public health outcomes across 15 participating agencies. Guided by the four fundamental challenges described in the Federal Health Information Technology Research & Development Strategic Framework, the IWG advances R&D by coordinating agency plans and activities, promoting collaborations, and providing a forum for exchanging information and articulating R&D needs to policy-makers and decision-makers.
Digital health, as defined by the FDA, includes a wide range of R&D areas, such as mobile health (mHealth), wearable devices, telehealth, and personalized medicine, as well as computing platforms, connectivity, software, sensors to collect data, and AI/ML to analyze health-related data.
Strategic Priorities
- Accelerate the R&D and Implementation of next-generation accessible, interoperable, reconfigurable digital health tools, devices, and services to enhance self-monitoring, diagnosis, treatment, and disease prevention; enable faster patient access to novel technology; provide effective point-of-care services; and reduce health disparities and inequities
- Promote findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable health and biomedical data with appropriate metadata to develop new healthcare-related insights supported by advanced technologies such as AI
- Support the integration & use of digital health tools, devices, and solutions within the healthcare and public health surveillance ecosystem to prevent and predict pandemics and understand and mitigate the impacts of changes in climate and the environment on health
- Promote accelerated innovation in the community via dissemination of regulatory, analytic, and information science tools to facilitate understanding and decisions affecting the digital health R&D of products that improve health and expand the U.S. bioeconomy
- Develop appropriate privacy-preserving, secure methods and data transfer strategies, and support implementation of standards and certification to enhance trust and confidence in health and biomedical systems
Chair
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Wendy J. Nilsen Deputy Division Director Information and Intelligent Systems (CISE/IIS) National Science Foundation |
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Dana Wolff-Hughes Program Director, Risk Factor Assessment Branch Epidemiology and Genomics Research Program National Cancer Institute National Institute of Health |
Technical Coordinator
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Olachi Onyewu |
Activities
- Federal Listening Session on Interoperability of Medical Devices, Data, and Platforms to Enhance Patient Care, Silver Spring, Maryland, July 17, 2019.
Publications
- Digital Health Lessons Learned During COVID-19 Workshop Report, Digital Health R&D IWG, June 30, 2023.
- Federal Health Information Technology Research and Development Strategic Framework, HITRD IWG, NITRD Subcommittee, National Science and Technology Council, March 2020.
- Federal Register Notice: 84 FR 4544, Request for Information: Action on Interoperability of Medical Devices, Data, and Platforms To Enhance Patient Care, NITRD Subcommittee, submitted by the National Science Foundation, February 15, 2019. Public Responses