The latest challenge from HHS' ONC — dubbed Easy EHR Issue Reporting Challenge — asks developers to build tools that help end users easily report potential health IT safety issues.
The agency wants developers to create an application that is able to:
- Integrate with an EHR's workflow;
- Use existing system data and workflow to minimize the time and effort needed to create a report;
- Allow the clinician practice, hospital or end user to choose who it submits the reports to; and
- Be EHR platform-agnostic.
"[W]orkflow disruptions place a large enough burden on many users that they just avoid reporting altogether. As a result, we as an industry have less data about potential health IT safety issues and are ill equipped to determine root causes, provide feedback to EHR developers and produce best practice guidance," ONC's Andrew Gettinger, MD, wrote in an agency blog post. "The goal of [the challenge] is to help EHR users identify, document and report a potential health IT safety issue when it happens."
Submissions are due Oct. 15, and ONC is offering up to $80,000 in prizes.
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