The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) has announced awards to two awardees under the Leading Edge Acceleration Projects (LEAP) in Health IT opportunity.
The LEAP in Health IT awardees, totaling nearly $2 million in funding over two years, will aim to 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, based in Boston, and MedStar Health Research Institute, in Hyattsville, Md.
- Children’s Hospital will aim to 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 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.
“We expect these two awardees to demonstrate where healthcare interoperability can go next,” said Don Rucker, M.D. national coordinator for health information technology. “Their efforts should inform a new generation of health IT development.”
The LEAP in Health IT funding opportunity has a three-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, the agency stated.
