Dive Brief:
- The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has selected seven organizations to share a total $1.5 million as part of their participation in two programs first announced at the Health Datapalooza Conference in May: The High Impact Pilot (HIP) and Standards Exploration Award.
- The groups aim to innovate standards-based solutions for the flow of health information in order to improve healthcare as well as the provider and patient experience.
- The ONC selected the seven awardees from more than 35 applicants based on factors including their ability to address health IT challenges, and merits of their proposed projects such as scalability, technical approach, and creativity.
Dive Insight:
Interoperability remains a behemoth of an issue in healthcare IT, interfering in efforts to move medicine into a brave new world based on data that could revolutionize population health, precision medicine and more. These programs under the ONC take aim at very specific issues as opposed to the big picture (which the ONC recently discussed as well), where the $1.5 million could potentially make a dent.
The four groups selected for the High Impact Pilot programs are The Health Collaborative, working to advance a patient-centered data model pilot project; Lantana Consulting Group, working to integrate pharmacist care plans into healthcare coordination efforts; RxREVU, Inc, looking to use prescription data to reduce spending and report on medication adherence; and The University of Utah, aiming to allow entities using the same EHR to share data through a surgical referrals dashboard application.
The three groups working under the Standards Exploration Awards are the Arkansas Office of Health Information Technology on implementing information exchange with behavioral health providers; the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center on exploring the cost efficiencies of integrating healthcare and clinical research systems with the center’s EHR; and Sysbiochem on facilitating data flow between an EHR, Laboratory Informatics System and an analytic application to assist in care coordination for breast cancer patients.
The groups are slated to report on their progress September 15, 2017.