When the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched the Pioneer Portfolio, my colleagues and I asked ourselves what fields might produce the greatest potential game-changers for health and health care. Genomics was at the top of the list. The human genome had been mapped and fantastic discoveries had begun to blossom, but a true era of personalized medicine still seemed too far off.

So we set out to do what Pioneer does best. We explored and learned. We networked.  We asked a lot of questions.  And we began to hunt down ideas.

On March 12, PBS NewsHour did a feature story on one of the big ideas that came out of that process: the world’s largest, deepest, and most diverse “biobank.” It presented a good opportunity to share the backstory. 

RWJF has awarded PatientsLikeMe a $1.9 million grant to create the world’s first open-participation research platform to develop patient-centered health outcomes. The new platform will be linked with the PatientsLikeMe network to help researchers develop health outcome measures that better reflect patients’ experiences with a disease, and assess health and quality of life in ways that matter to patients.

Jamie Heywood, co-founder of PatientsLikeMe, and Paul Tarini, senior program officer of the Pioneer Team at RWJF, share their views on why creating an open-access platform to develop measures that matter to patients could advance meaningful treatments that improve health and advance research.

Why is this a pioneering project?  What makes it novel? 

In the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s “Realigning Health with Care,” authors Rebecca Onie, Paul Farmer and Heidi Behforouz express their collective belief that—in the United States—we need to expand our understanding of the scope of health care, where it’s delivered and who delivers it. They also make it clear that the time to do so is now if we are going to confront our country’s rising health care costs, primary care physician shortage and expansion of the ranks of those living in poverty or hovering just above it. 

Onie, Farmer and Behforouz also propose that we need to look beyond our shores and borders for models for how to do so, pointing out that “in the developing world, there is no choice but to design health care systems that account for limited financial resources, scarce health care professionals and significant poverty.” 

We couldn’t agree more.

Innovation – the process of applying new thinking to old problems – is critical to improving our health care system.

On May 8, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced its first round of Health Care Innovation Award grants to 26 organizations nationwide, including two groundbreaking initiatives that have been supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Together, Project ECHO and the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers funded through Cooper University Hospital will receive three-year HHS grants totaling more than $11 million to amplify their efforts to improve both the quality and affordability of health care.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius noted that the awards will “provide our most creative minds … with the backing they need to build the strong, effective, affordable health care system of the future.”

In the case of both Project ECHO and the Camden Coalition, these words could not be truer.

Happiness is gaining currency today, particularly in relationship to health and medicine. That’s what we’ve been hearing ever since Harvard School of Public Health researchers Julia K. Boehm and Laura Kubzansky published their report “The Heart’s Content: The Association Between Positive Psychological Well-Being and Cardiovascular Health” in the Psychological Bulletin, under a grant from Pioneer. This is the first study of its kind to look closely at how positive psychological well-being—including happiness and optimism—plays a role in heart health.

The story was indeed hot – gaining attention from USA Today, The Huffington Post, TIME’s Healthland blog, WebMD, The New York Times’ Well Blog, ABCNews.com, MensHealth.com, ModernHealthcare.com, Oprah.com, and hundreds more – and being shared throughout social networks and on the web.