Research Portfolio

The following represents a sampling of the research which the Lab performs alongside diverse partners.

Medication Therapy Management (MTM)

Evaluation the economic impact of a MTM program provided by community pharmacy care service for patients. Pharmaceutical intervention has been shown to help patients in disease education and managing medications and therefore increase adherence and reduce unnecessary costs. Patients will be provided MTM-certified community pharmacist intervention, including regular educational sessions of drug therapy management and weekly emails containing health information.

Use of Actigraphy in Heart Failure Treatment

Actigraphs have been shown to accurately approximate general activity, including exercise and sleep. This information can be useful for physicians to improve care for patients with chronic conditions including heart failure. The HIT Lab monitored continuous data from actigraphy watches worn by patients with advanced heart failure and analyzed it to study actigraphy’s relationship with quality of life and disease-related events.

The Role of an Online Self-Care Platform in Hemophilia Care

Advoy.com is an online symptom and factor management program used in hemophilia care. The HIT Lab analyzed five years of momentary ecological assessments collected by Advoy in order to understand epidemiological and longitudinal trends amongst its thousands of global users.

Development of an Open Source Website providing Health Information Symmetry

As part of a novel grant to facilitate open-source information symmetry, the HIT Lab developed OursMedicina. Today, Oursmedicina.org is a not-for-profit organization with the goal to provide free, unbiased, non-commercial, and quality health information on the internet.

Physician Mobile Communication Service

A new subscriber-based service was proposed to meet the communication needs between physicians, nurses, lab technicians, and affiliated healthcare workers. The service would be accessed by physicians and nurses using a handheld computing device (e.g. PDA, cell phone handset) and by lab technicians using a desktop computer and would delivers its service by providing mediation of asynchronous communication between parties. The HIT Lab carried out a needs assessment and a feasibility analysis.

Location based services

A current study involves examining the feasibility of a successful mobile commerce service model for the US healthcare market. Potential and existing products, retailers, sponsors, and specific cases where it has been tested and proved successful are being looked at. The study will provide a perspective for creating higher adoption rates of the technology, and identify and discuss the imperatives to improve the adoption rates in the US healthcare industry.

Evaluation of a Wireless REM Sleep Monitoring Device

The HIT Lab is currently assisting in the evaluation of an automated wireless system for measuring sleep. The system uses a headband with a single bi-polar dry fabric sensor that wirelessly transmits data to a base station. The system is being compared against actigraphy and Polysomnography for its ability to accurately measure sleep.