Dive Brief:
- HHS has announced two funding opportunities worth $1.5 million - the High-Impact Pilot and the Standards Exploration Award (SEA) - to develop better standards for data transfer.
- The High Impact Pilots will implement a set of guidelines for health IT standards that will work within ONC's parameters to implement the Interoperability Roadmap.
- Awardees will need to produce results within one year and the funding will enable them to test solutions, evaluate scalability, and identify impacts of their selected standards and technology solutions.
Dive Insight:
The goals of the program include improving and sharing health information among healthcare stakeholders, improving care delivery, and demonstrating how health IT can positively impact patient experience.
Applicants are required to choose a "priority category" to focus on and at least three "impact dimensions" their project will address. SEA awardees have to choose a minimum of one impact dimension.
Priority categories include comprehensive medication management, laboratory data exchange, care coordination and a self-identified category that allows the applicant to identify another area they believe the advancement of interoperable standards could be demonstrated.
Impact dimensions choices include practice efficiency, clinical quality, cost efficiency, patient experience, safety, privacy and security and interoperable exchange.
SEA award funding totals $250,000, with no more than five awards expected.
“We have made significant progress in the flow of health information, but we still have work to do to ensure different systems speak the same language,” National Coordinator for Health IT Karen DeSalvo said in a prepared statement. “Today’s announcement will advance the use of common, interoperable standards, particularly for key pieces of data like medications and lab results.”