Deadlines
Letter of Intent: April 25, 2025
Submission: May 25, 2025
Background
As the world’s largest biomedical library, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) provides information services and products to a wide range of audiences, including librarians, healthcare professionals, community members, and policymakers. With such a complex group of users, NLM recognizes the importance of anticipating the needs of different populations under different contexts, which is why person-centric, and community-conscious design strategies are critical components of NLM’s vision for enhanced engagement. As part of NLM’s commitment to user engagement, NLM promotes the awareness of information resources, works to understand information needs, facilitates access, and prioritizes the ability for all to use information resources. As the leader for informatics resources for biomedicine and health, NLM is committed to developing innovative outreach approaches where information access can reduce health disparities, and support underserved communities that bear a disproportionate burden of disease.
The NLM Information Resources Grants to Reduce Health Disparities and Promote Health for All (G08) program addresses NLM’s second strategic goal, “To reach more people in more ways through enhanced dissemination and engagement pathways”. This goal is achievable by translating the needs of community, clinical and scholarly audiences into innovative and impactful methods and information dissemination strategies. The focus of the G08 program is on putting research knowledge into practice by providing information resources tailored to meet the needs of various communities and those who provide health care in various settings. Many factors influence the use of information in health decisions, including usability and user access factors (such as Internet and library access when managing health and health care), personal access factors (such as usability, readability, understandability, and health information presentation format), and other social determinants of health.
Resource Project Objectives
The G08 program supports resource projects that use information technology to improve the organization and management of health-related information, with a broad range of usability, user and personal access factors considered. Strategies proposed to achieve NLM’s G08 programmatic goals should be scalable, sustainable, generalizable and have the potential to provide useful information to communities that experience health disparities and those who provide health care for these communities, including doctors, nurse practitioners, midwives, hospitals, health centers, and clinics.
Applications submitted to this notice of funding opportunity must provide evidence that the intended audience is a population with health disparities or a health care provider for one of these populations. A population that experiences health disparities must have a significant disparity in the overall disease incidence, prevalence, morbidity, mortality, or survival rates in the population compared to the health status of the general population. Proposals that do not address a health disparity will be withdrawn for non-responsiveness.
In planning, applicants must include evidence of a collaboration with a medical or health library to ensure that materials developed have generalizability and are capable of being disseminated through medical or health libraries and their instrumentalities. Applicants are expected to present evidence of their demonstrated commitment to the needs of communities that experience health disparities. This NOFO requires the inclusion of a resource evaluation plan and evidence of resource sustainability. An evaluation plan that measures the value of the resource, usability, and user experience, should be provided in the application. Evaluations that meet the definition of a clinical trial are not allowed under this funding mechanism and will be withdrawn for non-responsiveness.
Topics that are responsive to this grant program include, but are not limited to:
- Developing or upgrading health information resources or services to meet the information needs of groups that experience health disparities.
- Providing health information resources or services to community organizations who serve populations that experience health disparities.
- Developing novel information strategies to facilitate the implementation of innovative patient-centered care and precision medicine for a variety of communities.
- Developing information resources that enable persons from populations that experience health disparities to make informed decisions regarding research participation, such as providing culturally tailored clinical trial education materials.
- Facilitating the use of library resources to identify population needs related to types and forms of information, including information visualizations, displays and interfaces to access information, to assist in making health-related decisions.
For more information, please see the opportunity announcement.