The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information IT has awarded more funding from its Leading Edge Acceleration Projects in Health Information Technology. The ONC awarded $2.7 million from these LEAP funds to four healthcare organizations in support of increasing interoperability. Specifically, the three areas in which the funds are focused are on advancing registry infrastructure, scaling health research, and integrating HHS data.
Here’s what the four organizations are going to be doing with the money:
Chesapeake Regional Information System for our Patients, an HIE, is trying to increase the adoption of modern technology standards like FHIR for data submitted to the registry.
MedStar Health Research Institute is working with several other organizations to find new opportunities for open source health IT projects, particularly those finding new uses of FHIR for medical research.
Children’s Hospital Corporation is also working with FHIR, attempting to develop a platform to manage bulk data for research with the ability to de-identify data and learn about specific groups.
The Division of Developmental Disabilities at the Missouri Department of Mental Health is advancing their value-based payment model with enhanced data services.
Last year, funds were awarded to the University of Texas at Austin and the San Diego Regional Health Information Exchange. These two organizations were focused on engaging underrepresented populations and providing open source FHIR Consent information, respectively. This is the third group to receive funds from LEAP aimed at spurring innovation in interoperable health IT.
The case for interoperability is quite clear as a benefit to both patients and healthcare organizations. Initiatives like LEAP in Health IT are providing value not just to the individual groups receiving funds, but many more as the several open source focused projects come to the forefront.
While ownership of data is important, the value of HIEs and registries can’t be understated. These aggregated data sources can be most effective when data is normalized and easily shareable. At Extract, our goal is to take the data and documents healthcare organizations receive from unstructured sources and make it more valuable. This means accurate, automated data entry, and data that arrives when, how, and where you expect it. Automation can automatically translate data from a resulting lab’s format into your own and send it directly to the EHR.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can make your data more consistent, please reach out.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.