The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) has awarded $4.8 Million to 18 sites for its national Health e-Technologies Initiative, a program designed to increase the use of interactive technologies to improve health behavior and disease management.

The Health e-Technologies Initiative national program office will provide the evidence base and knowledge required to build better eHealth programs. A resource and communication center of tools and materials to help translate the research into practice is in development.

Grant awards range from one to three years, with the grantees focusing on one of two categories:

• projects that address methodology and design challenges in evaluating eHealth applications; or,
• projects that evaluate the outcomes of existing applications.

According to the Boston Consulting Group, 80 percent of the 140 million online adults in the United States have used the Internet to look for health information and 96 percent of all physicians used Internet technology in 2002. Technologies such as interactive TV, interactive voice response systems, kiosks, personal digital assistants (PDAs), CD-ROMs, and DVD-ROMs can also be characterized as eHealth applications.

Click here for a RWJF press release about the initiative.

For more information on the program, visit www.hetinitiative.org.