Grant Writing and Nurse Entrepreneur Cover Letter

Grant Writing and Nurse Entrepreneur

Cover Letter

Dear (funder name)

I am writing this grant to your office seeking to secure funding for a novel, highly innovative healthcare appliance intended to augment the delivery and outcomes of critical health interventions, particularly for senior and other chronically ill patients. The device is a chatbot that differs from every other health bot in the market because it will diagnose numerous conditions instead of focusing on one disease, which is the norm for most health bots. This bot will attain this feat by having a detailed log of multiple conditions that afflict the geriatric population and will also have a highly integrated symptom checker to provide accurate diagnosis of the different conditions. The desired appliance is designed for use at home settings to help avert the complexities involved in transporting old and chronically sick people from home, to varied health facilities. The new innovation will also help cut down the costs involved in sustaining these patients in hospital settings because it will mainly be used to provide care to such patients while they are in the comfort of their homes, which will also help them receive the intensive care they should be receiving. The healthcare sector is witnessing increased demand for the adoption of better technologies that will facilitate better interaction and communication between patients and healthcare professionals. This demand can only be met by integrating technological appliances in healthcare and ensuring that such tools facilitate better engagement with patients. I seek funding to develop a chatbot that has video capability and is equipped with software that contains a portfolio of various medical conditions. .

The smart chatbot will also have video capability to assist healthcare specialists identify and process visual prompts on the patient’s condition through the device’s camera. The specialists will then use these prompts to execute real-time examination informed by the data the device will relay. The device will have the capacity to learn the physical behaviors of the patients and trigger alerts to care managers or the responsible family caretakers incase of any deviation, which will provide the needed intervention in case of a medical emergency. I am kindly asking you to look into this proposal and consider the vast positive implications it will have on the medical sector, especially in improving patient health for the chronically ill and the old, and also in alleviating the many resources used to care for these patients in hospital settings.

Executive Summary

The high demand for providing cost-effective informs the need to develop a smart chatbot, quality care enabled by engaging patients intimately, continually, and attending to their needs competently.  The rapidly increasing frequency of chronic conditions all over the world is demanding the use of better approaches to manage the conditions. However, the healthcare sector is already burdened as it strives to manage these varied conditions, which then demands the adoption of resource-efficient but effective approaches in providing such care. It is this need that informs the necessity of having virtual assistants that can allow the provision of care through digital devices while patients rest at home instead of ferrying them to the resource-scarce healthcare centres.   Agreeably, the role played by artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare is rapidly growing, with most pertinent of such developments being the use of virtual assistants to provide care. This technology is aptly exploiting the analytics embedded in the varied virtual gadgets as well as smart work processes to engender dynamic and professional responses.

My intention is that the chatbot converses with patients in an empathetic and reassuring voice to invoke the feeling of intimacy in the patient. Additionally, the gadget will be equipped with a set of varied health peripherals to extract vital information on a patient’s condition by asking and answering questions, collecting and evaluating vital signs, assessing the patient’s responses, and making the necessary recommendations for adjustment.

In addition, the gadget will help monitor the patient’s progress and issue alerts in case of improvements or deterioration. Further, the smart chatbot is desirable because it will provide care on a 24/7 basis, hence alleviating the need to have a nurse on a full-time basis. Moreover, the chatbot can monitor the patient to ensure that they are following the prescribed medication regimen and taking the medicine as prescribed. If the patient forgets to take the medicine at the prescribed time, the chatbot alerts the patient or the caregiver, hence improving the efficiency of care. Ultimately, the chatbot will help the overall condition of the chronically ill and old patients, and since it will contain all the requisite accoutrements that will help in providing the needed care, it will be easier for patients to open up in their conversations. This is because the bot will eliminate the intrusion of human beings as it will only require the nursing assistant receiving the patient’s information from the bot.

Overview of My Profession as a Nurse Entrepreneur

I am a certified nurse entrepreneur focused on using my medical proficiency and training to design and create a virtual medical device that will improve the health care outcomes of geriatric populations. My desire is in line with the varied businesses that a nurse entrepreneur can undertake, with one of the most notable being the development of medical devices as noted by RegisteredNursing.org. (2020). In light of this, entrepreneurship drives highly successful healthcare innovations in a variety of ways. For example, entrepreneurship in healthcare deals with the use of poor technology in the healthcare sector that has vastly contributed to poor health outcomes. For instance, medical specialists have often cited problems with their electronic health systems, which often results in burnout. Accordingly, entrepreneurship in the health sector yields innovations that improve the delivery of healthcare among different populations by easing healthcare practices, reducing expenses associated with care provision, saving resources, and improving patient outcomes.

The chatbot I am helping design and develop will increase diagnostic accuracy and help follow up on critical medical conditions. The quality of care that this device will engender will possibly surpass the economic significance of artificial intelligence-based management of health care. Ultimately, the chatbot provides a highly resourceful approach to managing these conditions while concurrently helping in directing the minimal resources in the healthcare sector towards other initiatives, hence saving more lives and money.

Need Statement

Artificial intelligence, and especially its application in making virtual assistant devices, is improving healthcare outcomes significantly. There are many advances in artificial intelligence that are now being incorporated in varied settings of healthcare, ranging from imaging to making diagnosis for various conditions. The application of virtual assistants in healthcare is enhancing the efficient use of healthcare resources significantly.  Besides adding new technological infrastructure to the healthcare sector, the use of virtual assistants is also improving predictions in medical care, which translates to better and more informed care. The better diagnosis availed by this technology is also enabling the design of better treatment plans that cater effectively to the medical needs of patients with varied medical conditions.

The incorporation of virtual assistant technology in healthcare cannot be underplayed if the widespread adoption of technology-assisted and informed care around the world is anything to go by. The need for developing this chatbot is also informed by the ever increasing problem of chronic illnesses especially among old people, with healthcare systems around the world grappling to contain these conditions with heavily burdened healthcare systems afflicted by a scarcity of resources.  Home-care populations are expanding rapidly and these patients are requiring attention on a 24/7 basis. Following the conventional ways of providing care and especially in assigning a care nurse to monitor the patients daily is highly expensive, both for the families with ailing patients and for the sector. However, checking on patients with virtual devices such as the chatbot is saving time for professionals and for the patients who would otherwise have to wait on nurses tending to many other patients in healthcare facilities. As such, it is justifiable to assert that the future of healthcare lies in using such devices to increase the manageability of patients, especially because the chatbot will help offload the operation and maintenance costs of healthcare infrastructure.

The chatbot invention also comes with an added advantage of creating more opportunities for growth, both for the specialists, for the sector, and for the new professionals required to manufacture and market them. The traditional nursing system requires only a handful of professional checking on patients. However, with the advent of this system, more jobs will arise with regard to the makers of the device, the installers, the specialists responsible for maintain them , the marketers, and many other entities who will be directly and indirectly involved with the device.  The greatest drive for installing this novel healthcare device, nonetheless, is not the convenience or daily presence or even its efficiency. Rather, it is the added comfort the device provides patients with and moreover, they will be more comfortable reporting on whatever changes in their conditions to the device than to a human attendant. Chronically ill patients are always wary of exposing their health conditions to other people, and especially to third parties. However, using this device allows patients the advantage of helping them to open up without fearing that the information about their health conditions they would desire to keep private will get exposed.

This observation is echoed by Robinson (2018), who avers that a study at the University of Southern California established that it is easier for a person to self-disclose their health conditions more straightforwardly to a virtual assistant such as the novel chatbot than to a human specialist. The easy disclosure to the assistants is because the patients are not overly concerned about the chatbot judging them on the discomforting aspects about their health conditions. Notably, a patient’s willingness to share their personal medical information is dependent on tow critical aspects, namely, the feeling of support and the lack of biased and unfair opinions and judgments on their condition. The innovative chatbot regards these aspects and this renders it an especially important tool for getting the medical information that chronically ill patients may feel sensitive about revealing.

Goals and Objectives

As aforementioned, the ultimate goals of the innovative chatbot are improving the experience of chronically ill patients, engaging the patients positively in their individual plans of care, and enhancing communication and interactions between caregivers, families, and healthcare providers. Further, the chatbot seeks to enhance healthcare results, extending patient lifespan, and reducing the invariably expensive costs of care for the various complications.  As previously indicated, this innovative chatbot will not concentrate on checking one disease. Rather, it will have a catalog of the symptoms of many illnesses, which will eliminate the need to have many bots for different conditions. Designing this bot will involve different specialists with varied expertise on different medical conditions, so that the bot will be fed with accurate symptoms of the diseases managed by the different professionals. In light of this, the goals and objectives of the new chatbot include delivering smart, conversational practices in addressing the healthcare needs of old and chronically ill patients. The bot will attain this objective by amalgamating medical content from verified sources and with the guidance of professional who specialize on varied medical conditions, who will provide information on the medications, medication procedures, and symptoms of these different medical conditions.

The smart healthcare practices will also feature the intelligent chatbot checking symptoms and executing reliable triage, in addition to exploiting the built-in models of language intelligently by referring to the pertinent medical terminologies. Further, the smart practices will be facilitated by the chatbot’s capability to manage disruptions, intricate medical questions, alterations in topics, as well as human mistakes. The chatbot will also seek to connect to patients on varied levels of intimacy, such as by allowing the patients to communicate with the bots with regard to checking their symptoms and relating them to the bot’s diseases database. After checking the symptoms, the bot will then provide the patients with the required medical assistance for understanding their ailments and seeking for the appropriate intervention. The intelligent bot will also provide patients with information on their prescription medication, which will help them relate to their conditions better and know how to manage them in future. Moreover, the bot will also remind patients of the time to take their medication, and will also remind them when they are about to forget or abscond their medication. Besides, the smart bot will provide intimate interactive experiences for patients as they will communicate directly and virtually with doctors from their homes whenever the need arises. The bot will also advise patients on the right foods to eat and even remind them of any scheduled meetings with the pertinent doctors, depending on their medical ailments. Ultimately, the bot will help allay the fears and anxiety faced by old, chronically ill patients.

Program Design (Methods of Attaining the Articulated Goals and Objectives)

To attain the highlighted goals, the intelligent chatbot will have an interactive screen that will have varied applications through which the patient can access the particular service needed. For instance, the patient can press the chat application to talk to a specialist or the symptom or prescription checker to determine the information on their condition or prescription medication. Further, the chatbot will also have a speaker system that will use the patient’s ordinary language to converse with the patient. It will also log the different questions and concerns raised by the patients and answer them as required, and where it cannot provide comprehensive information, it will automatically forward the queries and concerns to the pertinent care specialists. The bot also deals with the downside that affects the majority of other health bots in the market, which is that their services are only accessible when there is reliable internet connection.

The implication is that if a patient using a virtual assistant device losses their internet connection, the patient will not access the vital health information or even communicate with their caregiver, especially when the need to arises. Such loss of connectivity is very critical because vital patient information could go undocumented and if a patient undergoes a medical crisis, there is a high likelihood that it could unnoticed. Failure to detect medical issues could affect a patient’s wellbeing and also result in legal consequences. The difference with this innovative chatbot is that it incorporates local functionality into its various applications, which implies that if the bot losses connectivity, its applications can still record information into the device. This form of offline connectivity provides a previously unexplored by highly important healthcare feature for the elderly patients.

Evaluation of the Project’s Accomplishments

There are different ways I will use to assess the success of this program, particularly by the evaluating accomplishments it will deliver in helping manage the chronic illnesses of elderly patients. The success will be measured by evaluating the adoption rate of the new device, the reviews provided on the various marketing channels, and the degree to which it reduces the visits to health care centers by the elderly patients. The success rate of the bot’s medial guidelines in directing patients to the right care by providing them with the requisite medical advice will also be assessed. This information will be attained through the contact information that will be provided to the various individual and companies purchasing and marketing the device. The desirability of patient outcomes from using this device will be evaluated through seeking the consent of the buyers to interview them about the performance of the gadget. Gaining this consent will be acquired through asking the customers purchasing the device to grant our company permission in writing that they are comfortable receiving calls from our care centre to check up on the effectiveness of the device in managing their patients’ health conditions. The agreement will have a clause stating that the customer will receive a call after two months of using the gadget on their patients.

Other Financing and Sustainability

We do not desire to fund this project solely so that we can assure you of the reliability of our innovation. Currently, we have received funding assurances from the World Health Organization (WHO) branch in our country, the ministry of health, and from two accredited health institutions tasked with overseeing health practices in our county. These institutions have promised us considerable funding that can help us get the resources and manpower required to make this device based on the articulated specifications. However, we still need additional funding to ensure the sustainability of our product in the market because especially in the introductory phases of the gadget. However, owing to its highly innovative and unique features and application, we are sure that the device will soon bring in substantive finances to ensure the project is sustainable in the long-term. The support we have from these organizations as well as from varied government agencies in our country should assure you of the viability and sustainability of our project.

Information about our Organization

You can trust our organization because we have in business for the last twenty years. We specialize in providing all forms of care to our patients and we are renowned for our excellence in meeting the healthcare needs of the elderly populations. We specialize in geriatric care because we recognize this as an often neglected population, owing to the sensitivity and complexities involved in providing care for the elderly sick. We have been recognized by the government, the country government and various local and international health entities for our excellence in care for the elderly. We have detailed journals of the local and internationally-based patients we have successfully treated, and we are pleased to provide you with the information you need. However, we kindly ask you recognize our need to stick to the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) guidelines that demand safeguarding the privacy of patients’ medical data as averred by HIPAA Journal (2020).

Project Budget

The various applications that the chatbot will contain include a backend that will facilitate the management of messages from multiple avenues and process them in language that the patient understands, mainly though Natural language processing assistance such as Wit.ai as noted by Saxena (2020). The bot will also contain channels or endpoints that allow the integration of each particular channel to get the messages. Upon receiving the message, the bot will use natural language processing (NLP) to extract the intents as well as entities of the message provided by the user. The bot will also use the natural language processing intents as well as entities to create smart conversations by creating an algorithm for each smart conversation. The bot will then be integrated with multiple applications to provide the required interaction between the bot, the patient and the health provider. Integration takes about 2 to 3 days, although it depends on the complexity of the apps, with developing the whole bot taking about 3 weeks. The cost of designing, developing and integrating the requisite operational features of the bot would amount to around 50,000 dollars. We are kindly asking you to provide us with support of around 10,000 dollars for each bot as we seek to produce 100 chatbots after our first successful trial.

Conclusion

We kindly ask you to consider our request and if necessary, do some research on our claims to verify the viability of our product. The further research will also help extend your understanding on the importance of this gadget in the contemporary health sector. Kindly check into the various benefits that our product would contribute in providing care for the elderly and if there are any concerns or questions, please reach put for confirmation through the contacts we have sent to your email address.

Thank you

Yours Sincerely

(Nurse Sign)

(Nurse Name)

References

HIPAA Journal (2020). HIPAA Compliance Checklist. HIPAA Compliance Checklist 2019-2020. Retrieved on 16^th April, 2020 from https://www.hipaajournal.com/hipaa-compliance-checklist/

RegisteredNursing.org. (2020). What is a nurse entrepreneur? Retrieved on 16^th April, 2020 from https://www.registerednursing.org/specialty/nurse-entrepreneur/

Robinson, S. (2018). Healthcare virtual assistants bring efficiency and empathy to patient care. Retrieved on 16^th April, 2020 from https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/industries/healthcare/virtual-assistant.html

Saxena, P. (2020). How much does it cost to develop a chatbot. Retrieved on 16^th April, 2020 from https://appinventiv.com/blog/how-much-is-chatbot-development-cost/