U.S. Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity Grant: Developer Tools for Public Physiology Research in Medical Education

The Developer Tools for Medical Education initiative is primarily focused on the creation of publicly accessible, free, open-license, and/or open-source tools for creation of medical training and education content and technology. Principally, the DTME initiative seeks to support the strategic goals of the Joint Program Committee 1 – Medical Training and Health Information Sciences Research Program (JPC1) through the leveraging of technologies created by this effort, finding cost efficiencies through utilization of free tools and allowing more commonality for military medical training technology systems. It is envisioned that expanding a research effort to create this capability to an open public trial and experimentation basis will allow for feedback from a larger part of the medical training community than would otherwise be possible from a single group. Feedback regarding novel uses of the evolving research platform and the data created by this research will lead to improvements in the science regarding simulated physiology for use in public and private sector medical education.

The primary, but not exclusive, purposes of this Program Announcement (PA) are to solicit pre-proposals and then by invitation only, request full proposal submissions for research that will:

1) Create a public physiology research platform for use by the medical simulation development and education community;
2) enable accurate and consistent simulated physiology across multiple training applications and platforms;
3) allow for community contributions to this effort;
4) encourage greater use of scientifically-based physiological & pharmacological predictive technologies;
5) lower barriers to creating medical training content through availability of this resource
6) serve the training needs of the military; and
7) expand the corpus of knowledge regarding the use of simulated physiology for medical education. Additional information regarding the detailed purposes and anticipated outcomes of this PA is provided in the Full Announcement under Award Information, Section I.C.