Digital Health Research and Development

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 health IT tools and services to reduce administrative burden, enable a new bio economy, and serve the full community of users.
• Leverage the power of data, computing, and AI to promote infrastructure and standards for accessible, interoperable, reusable health data, devices, and related applications.
• Develop privacy-preserving and secure methods, standards, testing, certification, and data transfer strategies to make systems and repositories more robust and accessible for research collaboration.
• Provide education and training opportunities to build the diverse, highly skilled, and interdisciplinary health IT workforce of the future.