AHRQ funding new HIT safety research

The Department of Health and Human Services' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has issued two special emphasis notices of funding opportunities for researchers interested in studying the safe use of EHRs and health IT.

The funding opportunities include consumers' personal health management needs and health IT design principles and another focuses on how health IT improves healthcare quality, with an emphasis on design, implementation, use, impact on outcomes and measurement.  

AHRQ hopes that the projects will generate new evidence on safe health IT practices that could be used by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the FDA and others.

"The use of health IT has been demonstrated to improve healthcare quality. Use of health IT has also been associated with improvement in patient safety by reducing errors, as well as improved cost-effectiveness," AHRQ says in an announcement. "However, there are still gaps in the health IT evidence base as these findings cannot be generalized to all types of heath IT applications or systems, all care settings, all user groups, or all care processes."

Applications are due March 28.