# Determining the acceptability and feasibility of mobile-health approaches to gather clinical information from patients at home following hospital discharge

> **NIH NIH R21** · UNIVERSITY OF IOWA · 2020 · $286,629

## Abstract

Abstract
Patients are increasingly leaving the hospital sooner and continuing therapies historically only
administered in hospitals in their homes. One of the first of such therapies was the home
administration of intravenous antibiotics, referred to as outpatient parenteral antimicrobial
therapy (OPAT). Many patients discharged on OPAT require unplanned hospital readmissions
and visits to the emergency department within the first 30 days of discharge. Because this
population routinely suffers from a wide range of medical and surgical problems, it presents a
unique opportunity to efficiently study a range of health outcomes in a vulnerable population.
The emerging ubiquity of personal computing devices provides new opportunities to collect
health-related data outside traditional clinical environments. The promise of collecting
meaningful data increases if survey questions can be paired with “objective” information
collected from sensors capable of collecting health-related data. To date, our CTSA hub at The
University of Iowa has designed, tested and deployed custom m-health software to aggregate
information from subjects using SMS, web-based tools, and mobile apps. We have also
integrated information directly from sensors (step counters, blood pressure cuffs, scales,
thermometers) into our custom software so that we can remotely collect objective health-related
data from research subjects. In this proposal we will use our m-health platform to shift health-
related measurements and data collection previously only available in hospitals into research
subjects' homes. In addition, we will use our approach to measure health-related outcomes
among patients discharged on OPAT.
The overarching goal of our research is to develop easy-to-use informatics tools that are not
disease specific. With these tools, we hope to enable the efficient collection of important clinical
data from patients outside traditional research and clinical settings. First, we will assess the
feasibility of using our mobile-health approach to gather clinical data from patients in their
homes following discharge from the hospital on OPAT. Second, we will determine subject and
researcher perspectives regarding the utility of our approach. Third, we will estimate the sample
size necessary to power a study to determine the utility of remotely-collected patient-reported
data for predicting hospital readmissions among patients discharged on OPAT.
Completion of these aims will allow us to determine the potential for using m-health tools in a
real-world setting to gather not only patient-reported outcomes, but also data from sensors to
help answer a wide range of clinical research questions.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10052922
- **Project number:** 1R21TR003410-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF IOWA
- **Principal Investigator:** PHILIP M POLGREEN
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $286,629
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-09-01 → 2022-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10052922

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10052922, Determining the acceptability and feasibility of mobile-health approaches to gather clinical information from patients at home following hospital discharge (1R21TR003410-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10052922. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*