NEW YORK — The National Institutes of Health on Thursday that it has awarded the Research Triangle Institute $5.7 million to help raise awareness and maintain participant engagement in the All of Us Research Program.
The NIH also said that it added four additional healthcare provider organizations to help advance the initiative with $1.1 million in funding.
The program, launched in 2015, aims to enroll 1 million Americans willing to donate biological samples and share a variety of data from electronic medical records, surveys, wearables, and genetic testing that researchers can use to learn more about diseases and develop treatments. It opened up to participants in 2018.
With the new funding, North Carolina-based Research Triangle Institute will develop ways to raise awareness of the All of Us program through community and healthcare provider organizations in order to increase participant enrollment. It will also develop approaches for communicating with existing participants and providers to keep them engaged with the program, as well as with the research community regarding use of All of Us data.
The NIH also said that the University of Texas Health Science Center (UT Health) at Houston, UT Health at Tyler, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Washington University in St. Louis have joined the All of Us program as healthcare provider organizations. As such, the organizations will invite their patients to join the program, complete health-related surveys, and share their electronic health records.
"Through [the All of Us] program, 350,000 people have already raised their hands to help equip researchers with the data they need to answer scientific questions that affect their communities," All of Us CEO Josh Denny said in a statement. "We're proud to work with these new partners to help more communities get involved and test a new model of enrollment."