The National Library of Medicine recently announced a new funding opportunity, seeking applications for novel informatics and data science approaches that can help individuals gather, manage and use information regarding their personal health.

While patients typically discuss their personal health decisions with the clinicians from whom they receive care, they also seek health information from sources that are increasingly digital and constantly changing. For instance, health-related information can come from diverse sources, such as mass media and social networks, health care organizations, government agencies, clinicians, family members and friends. It can also comes in many different formats, such as data from an individual’s electronic medical record, family histories and genealogies, data streams from activity trackers, personal genome sequences, articles and videos, etc.

New approaches are needed to meet the needs of consumers and patients, whose health literacy, language skills, technical sophistication, education and cultural traditions may affect how they find, understand and use the information. Applicants may propose new tools or extensions to the capabilities of existing open source tools. In either case, scientific innovation is key.

Applications are due by 5:00 pm on May 1, 2017. For more information, see PAR-17-159.