The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT today announced $60 million in grant awards to four advanced research institutions to promote "breakthrough research" and innovative methods to solve health IT challenges.
Under the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) program, each institution's research projects will identify short-term and long-term solutions to overcome difficult hurdles to the widespread use of health information technology.
The grants were made to: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to assure the security of health IT; the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, to enable patient-centered cognitive support for clinicians; Harvard University, to make progress toward new healthcare application and network-platform architectures; and the Mayo Clinic of Medicine, to promote the secondary use of electronic health record data while maintaining privacy and security.
Technology needs to continuously advance and convey new solutions to make it even more beneficial, said Dr. David Blumenthal, the national health IT coordinator, in a blog post commenting on the grants.
"While I'm proud of what ONC has achieved so far, I'm humbled by the size of the task still in front of us," he said.
"The HITECH Act clearly recognized a need for progressive and innovative thinking to overcome barriers and ensure the long-term viability of our health care system."
Blumenthal said the money would not fund research for research's sake. "This is not ivory tower research; its goal is to quickly infuse the dynamic health IT sector with new thinking, ideas, and solutions," Blumenthal said.
Getting health IT "right" is difficult, added Charles Friedman, ONC's chief science officer. "While the health IT of today is largely equal to the task of supporting meaningful use as envisioned for 2011, current technology will be challenged by the more ambitious meaningful use visions of 2013, 2015, and beyond," he said.
