The HHS Funding Opportunity Notice (FOA) posted December 10, 2021, titled Technology Development to Reduce Health Disparities Clinical Trial Optional encourages grant applications to develop and translate medical technologies aimed at reducing disparities.
Components of Participating organizations within HHS include NIH’s, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities
The purpose of the funding is to reduce health disparities by developing appropriate medical technologies to help specific population groups. These population groups include racial and ethnic minorities such as African Americans, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Hawaiians and other U.S Pacific Islanders as well as subpopulations of these groups. The goal is also to help socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals, sexual and gender minorities, and medically underserved populations especially in rural and urban areas.
The funding announcement seeks advances in medical technologies to reduce health disparities associated with diseases, illnesses, and conditions of public health importance. Applicants are encouraged to develop medical devices, imaging systems, robotic systems, biomaterial interfaces, synthetic biological systems, mathematical and modeling solutions, plus other technologies of interest. Proposed medical technologies must be affordable, culturally acceptable and easily accessible to those who need them.
Specifically, a non-inclusive list of appropriate medical technologies can include: telehealth and telemedicine technologies for remote diagnosis and monitoring, sensors for point-of-care diagnosis, devices for in-home monitoring, mobile, portable diagnostic and therapeutic systems, devices to integrate diagnosis and treatment, diagnostics or treatments that do not require special training, devices that can operate in low resource environments, non-invasive technologies for diagnosis and treatment, integrated automated systems to assess or monitor a specific condition, robotic devices for performing specialized skills or enhancing usability, and low cost biomaterial interfaces to increase medical device and component affordability.
Eligible applicants for funding can include universities, nonprofits, for profits, small businesses, state, county, city and Indian/Native American Tribal Governments, independent school districts, plus others.
The funding amount for awards is $500,000 per year with 4 years for the project. The estimated number of awards expected to be funded is 3-4 awards. The estimated total program funding is $2,400,000.
Go to https://grants.gov/web/grants/search-grants.html for more information on the Funding Opportunity titled Technology Development to Reduce Health Disparities (R01 Clinical Trial Optional) RFA-EB-21-001 posted December 10, 2021.