The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) announced two awards totaling nearly $2 million in funding over two years to two awardees under the Leading Edge Acceleration Projects (LEAP) in Health Information Technology (Health IT) funding opportunity.
The LEAP in Health IT awardees will address fast emerging and future challenges to advance the development and use of interoperable health IT. The funding opportunity solicited applications focused in one of two areas of interest: (1) expanding the scope, scale, and utility of population-level data-focused application programming interfaces (APIs); or (2) advancing clinical knowledge at the point of care. An API is technology that allows one software application to seamlessly access the services another software application.
The awardees are:
- Children’s Hospital Corporation, Boston MA: Children’s Hospital will expand the scope, scale, and utility of population-level APIs including enhancing the use of flat data files and creating a new population health analytics app allowing payors to access permitted data and metrics on covered populations through the use of those files.
- MedStar Health Research Institute, Hyattsville MD: MedStar will advance clinical knowledge at the point of care by transforming isolated risk calculators into open standards-based applications that seamlessly and securely run across health IT platforms and provider organizations to optimize clinical workflow, improve care coordination, and support patient engagement.
It is critical that the field of healthcare innovate and leverage the latest technological advancements and breakthroughs far quicker than it currently does to optimize real-time solutions, especially in areas that are ripe for acceleration. To do so, the awardees will further a new generation of health IT development and inform the innovative implementation and refinement of standards, methods, and techniques for overcoming major barriers and challenges as they are identified.
The LEAP in Health IT funding opportunity has a 3-year open application period and ONC may issue future awards to eligible applicants for new priority areas of interest. This will be contingent on the availability of funds and ONC priorities.
