Tips for Applying for RAP Digital Health Funding
Taken from the Digital Health Innovators Forum (archived)
1. How can I find a programmer to help me develop my project? How can I get a quote for the RAP application?
You can look for a programmer within UCSF, or from an external vendor. Within UCSF, there's ISU Mobile Development and also QUIP. For assistance with identifying and contracting with external programmers, contact Tuhin Sinha at ITA.
To get a quote for your RAP application, contact ISU or call Jeff Jorgenson at 415-476-5202 for help defining your application.
2. Can I submit to BOTH the Digital Health Research and Catalyst Awards?
You may submit separate Digital Health Research and Catalyst Award proposals on the same project, but the applications would have to be on very different aspects of that project. If your main intent is to generate pilot data for funding (I assume from NIH or a research agency), then you should apply for the Digital Health Research award. If your targeted external funder is a company, or a tech transfer grant opportunity (e.g., the UC Proof of Concept Program), then you should apply to the Catalyst Award. It will be the rare situation where a single project is capable of pursing both goals at the same time.
If you are applying for funds to develop an app to address a need that might free up physician time or allow patients to avoid coming in to the clinic, and your primary objective is to field the app for routine operational use, then you should apply to the Catalyst Award. If your primary objective of the project is to generate publishable data showing that your approach will increase efficiency, etc. then apply to the Digital Health Research Award.
Both award mechanisms accept applications for app development: be sure to address need and rationale, to involve users in design and testing, and propose success metrics. We also strongly recommend submitting a quote from a developer. The UCSF mHealth Group is an internal UCSF developer. Contact Tuhin Sinha at UCSF Office of Innovation, Technology & Alliances (ITA) for assistance with outside developers, contracts, etc.
If you are seeking funds for initial app development and feasibility testing, again, pick the grant mechanism that's appropriate for your primary goal. Please review the RFPs to see which one you can make a stronger case for.
3. For app development/feasability proposals, what should go in the research design section?
If your proposal is for initial build of an app or system and initial user testing, then your research section should focus on the rationale, motivation, methods, and metrics for that. See related posts in this Forum on software development, usability, etc. You do not need to detail your future plans for field testing or validation, but you should provide enough rationale and methods that reviewers will be keen to fund your feasibility project.
4. What do I need to know to create mobile apps?
There are two important things to learn about creating mobile apps or any apps for that matter:
1. Learning about the overall architecture so you know how they work at a high level: native apps vs web apps; front-end app vs back-end web services and databases; for mobile, specific phone capabilities like: accelerometers for device orientation, GPS, compass, RFID reader, touch sensors via the touch screen, light detection, SMS, proximity sensor, audio sensor, video and image sensing via the camera, and device sensors via bluetooth.
2. Design skills and understanding: your audience, workflow, story-boarding, use-cases, usability, performance and scale.
The key question to ask when contemplating a mobile app is: Why does it have to be mobile?
But even before that you need to exhaustively define the problem to solve and decide whether mobility helps you solve it. If you start with the premise that you want a mobile app then you've got it exactly backwards.
If you want learn how to code to understand the complexities of development or to write your own programs then this is great. However in the "Valley", development is a commodity, design is not.
5. Should I develop a native app or a mobile web app?
See Jakob Nielsen's Mobile Sites vs. Apps: The Coming Strategy Shift for a great summary. Bottom line: native apps for now, but in the longer run, mobile web approaches will win the day (e.g., see UCLA's Mobile Web Framework).
Before deciding you first need to answer the question of what problem you want your app to solve. You then need to consider what you need your app to do to solve that problem and then just as important - who is your audience?
Examples help. Case 1: The clinical nurses in the Memory and Aging Center are working with dementia patients. They wish to create an app that allows the patient and family to have an updated care plan for the patient once they are discharged. They also need this information made available to the family PCP. As Jakob Nielsen says in his article "It's much easier for others to link to a site than to integrate with a 3rd-party application." So they went with a Web app.
Case 2: Joy Bhosai working via the Proctor Foundation created an app to allow healthcare workers to screen for trachoma in villages in Niger. She wanted to take advantage of a special camera that could be integrated with the app on the phone. Given the camera integration and the uncertainty of web access in the remote locations they went with a native app.