ONC announced Sept. 10 that San Diego Regional Health Information Exchange and University of Texas at Austin will receive awards under the agency's Leading Edge Acceleration Projects in Health Information Technology funding opportunity.
LEAP in Health IT awards designate healthcare organizations that seek to address challenges regarding the advancement and development of interoperable health IT. ONC awarded more than $999,000 to both the San Diego Regional HIE and UT Austin to fund their respective projects.
San Diego Regional HIE will apply the funding to software development and research of standards, use case, community testing, production deployment, pilots, tutorials, population health and consent management. The organization will also develop and offer a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources consent implementation guide and package of open-source prototypes to assist partners in using FHIR consent resource.
UT Austin will use the award to develop and test a patient engagement platform to support mobile applications designed for underrepresented populations. The platform aims to increase participation in health research and care, address patient security and privacy needs, employ user-centered design approaches and will allow for data sharing from disparate sources across patients, clinicians and researchers.