ONC: $16M program will fund HIE breakthroughs

The Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health IT has allotted more than $16 million to fund the Health Information Exchange (HIE) Challenge Program, which encourages breakthroughs for nationwide HIE.

The program focuses on five challenge areas identified as key needs since federal and state governments began implementation of the HITECH Act, according to the HHS.

Awards will fund the development of technology and approaches that will be developed in pilot sites and then shared, reused and leveraged by other states and communities to increase nationwide interoperability.

The five themes are:
  1. Achieving health goals through HIE;
  2. Improving long-term and post-acute care transitions;
  3. Giving patients access to their own health information;
  4. Developing tools and approaches to search for and share granular patient data (such as specific lab results for a given time period); and
  5. Fostering strategies for population-level analysis.

Awards will range between $1 million and $2 million each, and will be in the form of supplemental funding to State HIE Cooperative Agreements, which have provided approximately $500 million to states and state-designated entities to enable HIE.

Only direct award recipients of the State HIE Cooperative Agreement Program may apply, and there is a two-award limit for each applicant under this funding opportunity.

Each application must address a single challenge theme. Applicants may separately apply for grants under any or all of the five challenge themes, but may not submit more than one application under any one challenge theme.

ONC anticipates that the funding for this initiative will support 10 awards.

More information about the State HIE Cooperative Agreement Program can be found here.

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