This week, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology announced new $2 million award funding for cutting-edge innovation projects under its flagship Health Information Technology Acceleration initiative.
why does it matter
The LEAP in Health IT program aims to recognize and encourage healthcare organizations that are driving new approaches and tools to harness information technology toward better care delivery, enhance clinical research capabilities and help solve long-standing challenges, particularly in relation to data interoperability.
For this year’s edition, ONC focused specifically on two research imperatives:
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Explore the use of advanced HL7 Rapid Healthcare interoperability resource capabilities.
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Identify data quality improvements to the core US data for interoperability data items.
For their work on FHIR using cases and data quality for USCDI, respectively, the agency funds HEALTHeLINK, a nonprofit regional health information organization in Western New York, and Boston Children’s Hospital for further innovation research.
Explore FHIR’s advanced capabilities
HEALTHeLINK—where hospitals, physicians, payers, and others collaborate across eight counties in Western New York to share clinical information—is working on a new project, “Advanced FHIR Capabilities for Advance Care Planning Use Cases to Improve Patient Care.”
It will focus on the challenge of advancing care planning documents collected from various sources that are difficult to access at the point of care.
The plan is for HEALTHeLINK to explore FHIR-focused software development using open source code and implementation, testing and experimentation under real-world conditions, with the following goals, according to the ONC:
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Demonstrate advanced FHIR onboarding use case to collect Advance Directives (AD) metadata and PDFs from primary care practices and hospitals via electronic health record (EHR) vendors.
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Show advanced FHIR of HIE use case/interoperability.
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Show advanced FHIR query in real time by adding AD data sources, such as eMOLST (New York Warehouse) and Directive (National Warehouse).
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Demonstrate a use case for the advanced endpoint of the FHIR API and the SMART implementation of the FHIR Application (API) with primary care providers, hospitals, nursing homes, and emergency medical services (EMS) personnel.
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Show real-time advanced FHIR trigger and real-time query for emergency departments, pre-visit planning and AD use cases.
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Develop HIE AD data analytics and reporting for targeted population health, research and community education activities to increase AD use and reduce disparities.
The goal is to accelerate adoption of FHIR Advanced by demonstrating its value in solving complex problems in healthcare interoperability.
USCDI Quality Improvements
In the meantime, Boston Children’s will focus on CumulusQ – an open source platform for improving the quality of FHIR data across the ecosystem. The project aims to develop and build an interoperable health IT ecosystem, enabling easy access to high-quality, standardized health care data – with a primary focus on core US data for FHIR-formatted interoperable data elements, which is critical to the ONC’s efforts at TEFCA .
Goals by agency:
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Formulate and implement an iterative process for understanding and assessing the quality of both structured and unstructured USCDI components.
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Manifest the iterative process from Goal 1 into a scalable, open source infrastructure that leverages FHIR APIs in caregiving settings.
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Implement the tools from Objective 2 at multiple locations in the CumulusQ network, and once refined, publish a snapshot of the data quality at those locations as a representative benchmark, with a root cause analysis of anomalies in the data.
The biggest trend
Prepare ONC file LEAP in Health Information Technology Program five years ago, as an effort to fund groundbreaking research on a variety of clinical and technological imperatives, such as point-of-care decision support, APIs that focus on population-level data, tools to make electronic health records more AI-ready, and referral management strategies that address determinants Social for health and more.
In 2020, for example, the Awards funded a group of hospitals, health systems, HIEs, and public health agencies with $2.7 million to study a variety of interoperability and data-sharing projects.
On the record
“We are excited to see these new award recipients get started and what they can do to benefit FHIR and USCDI,” Steve Posnack, deputy national coordinator for health information technology, said in a statement.
Mike Milliard is the Executive Editor of Healthcare IT News
Email the author: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.