The Department of Defense is working to provide the best medical care and outreach programs to all service members and veterans that suffer clinical levels of major depressive disorders, PTSD, and TBI along with disorders at subclinical levels.
Online resources, interactive media, and social networking help supplement traditional healthcare options and help service members and veterans find treatment from trained providers. In addition to social networks, two other technologies such as telehealth and medical informatics are greatly assisting in treating mental health.
The Healing Heroes Program (HH) is going to develop and apply all of these technologies to improve the medical and psychological healthcare for service members. HH will be developed as an online resource with compelling and helpful information and will be an ever changing flexible platform to allow for the development and testing of new internet technologies and ideas by third-party developers.
Specifically HH will feature psychological health education and outreach, a social-networking hub with advanced functionality, a telehealth portal for consultation and/or treatment, and serve as a medical informatics platform to create new medical capabilities.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency recently posted a Broad Agency Announcement Funding opportunity that will result in multiple awards with a final closing date of October 13, 2010. The initial closing date was July 13, 2010, but proposals will still be accepted by October 13, 2010.
DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals to address web-based approaches for medical and psychological health social networking, care deliver via telehealth, and for work in informatics. The proposed research needs to address innovative approaches that will advance science, technology, or systems.
Go to www.darpa.mil/ipto/solicit/baa/BAA-10-62-pip.pdf , www.fbo.gov,
www.darpa.mil/ipto/soliciti/solicit_open.asp, email DARPA-BAA-10-62@darpa.mil, or fax (703) 248-1818, for more details.
