The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has awarded $2 million to New York’s HEALTHeLINK and Boston Children’s Hospital for pioneering initiatives in advanced FHIR capabilities and USCDI data quality improvement. These projects, under the Leading Edge Acceleration Projects in Health Information Technology (LEAP in Health IT) program, aim to enhance healthcare delivery through innovative IT solutions. HEALTHeLINK focuses on advanced FHIR for care planning, while Boston Children’s Hospital develops CumulusQ, an open-source platform to improve FHIR data quality.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) has granted $2 million in funding to the latest winners of the 2023 Leading Edge Acceleration Projects in Health Information Technology (LEAP in Health IT) initiative. Notable among these winners are New York’s HEALTHeLINK and Boston Children’s Hospital, both recognized by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for their innovative exploration of advanced capabilities within Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and improvement of data quality within the United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI).
The LEAP in Health IT program acknowledges and promotes healthcare organizations at the forefront of pioneering novel approaches and tools utilizing information technology to enhance healthcare delivery, advance clinical research capabilities, and address persistent challenges, particularly surrounding data interoperability.
In this year’s edition of the program, ONC placed special emphasis on two key research areas:
1. Exploring advanced capabilities of HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR).
2. Enhancing the quality of data elements within the United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI).
As a result of their accomplishments in these respective domains, HEALTHeLINK, a regional health information organization for western New York, and Boston Children’s Hospital have been awarded funding by the agency to further their innovative research endeavors.
HEALTHeLINK, which facilitates information exchange among hospitals, physicians, payers, and other stakeholders across eight counties in western New York, is engaged in a project titled “Advanced FHIR Capabilities for Advance Care Planning Use Cases to Improve Patient Care.” This initiative aims to address the challenge of aggregating advance care planning documents from diverse sources and making them readily accessible at the point of care.
HEALTHeLINK’s project will involve the development of FHIR-focused software using open-source code, followed by implementation, testing, and real-world piloting. The primary objectives of this effort, according to ONC, include:
– Demonstrating advanced FHIR capabilities for onboarding advance directive (AD) metadata and PDFs from primary care practices and hospitals through electronic health record (EHR) vendors.
– Illustrating advanced FHIR use in health information exchange (HIE) and interoperability scenarios.
– Showcasing advanced FHIR real-time querying by integrating AD data sources like eMOLST and My Directives.
– Exhibiting advanced SMART on the FHIR app and FHIR application programming interface (API) endpoint use cases with various healthcare providers.
– Demonstrating advanced FHIR real-time triggering and querying for emergency departments, pre-visit planning, and AD scenarios.
– Developing HIE AD data analytics and reporting for population health initiatives and research to enhance AD utilization and decrease disparities.
The overarching goal of this initiative is to expedite the adoption of advanced FHIR capabilities by highlighting their efficacy in addressing intricate challenges within healthcare interoperability.
In parallel, Boston Children’s Hospital will focus on a project called “CumulusQ,” an open-source platform designed to enhance FHIR data quality across the healthcare ecosystem. This initiative seeks to establish an interoperable health IT environment that facilitates more accessible access to standardized, high-quality healthcare data, with a specific emphasis on USCDI data elements in FHIR format. These elements are crucial to ONC’s Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) efforts.
The key objectives of Boston Children’s Hospital’s project encompass:
– Developing and implementing an iterative process to comprehend and evaluate the quality of both structured and unstructured USCDI elements.
– Translating the iterative quality assessment process into a deployable open-source infrastructure, leveraging FHIR APIs within care delivery sites.
– Implementing the tools from the previous objective across multiple sites within the CumulusQ network. Once refined, disseminating a snapshot of data quality at these sites as a representative benchmark, accompanied by a root cause analysis of data irregularities.
ONC established the LEAP in Health IT Program five years ago to fund innovative research on a range of clinical and technological imperatives, including decision support at the point of care, population-level data-focused APIs, AI-ready enhancements for electronic health records, referral management strategies that address social determinants of health, and more.
Steve Posnack, Deputy National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, remarked, “We are excited to witness the progress of these new awardees and their utilization of FHIR and USCDI to drive advancements in healthcare.”
