AHRQ has plans to publish three types of Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOA) for Health IT research by the end of August. The FOAs will include:
- Research demonstration projects to study how to implement health IT to improve the quality, safety, and effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare in ambulatory settings and how to support care transitions between ambulatory settings or non-ambulatory settings
- Exploratory development research projects that will conduct pilots or feasibility studies to help implement future health IT
- Small research grants in health IT to perform an economic analyses of health IT implementation and to do a secondary data analyses of health IT research
For the “Notice of Intent to Publish Program Announcements for Health IT” go to http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-HS-08-011.html. Until the FOAs are published, AHRQ cannot provide additional information on the content. For general comments regarding AHRQ’s health IT program, contact Angela Lavanderos, Center for Primary Care, Prevention, and Clinical Partnerships, at Angela.Lavanderos@ahrq.hhs.gov
In another announcement published on July 16th, AHRQ released the pre-solicitation notice (AHRQ-2008-10036) “Incorporating Health Information Technology into Workflow Redesign”. The agency wants to develop a practical and easy to use toolkit that will provide a workflow analysis and redesign to be used by both small and large practices as well as in other ambulatory settings. Health IT needs to support the design since the agency’s goal is to encourage the adoption of clinical HIT to bring evidence based decision support to the point of care.
The proposer needs to be able to do literature reviews, synthesize results from a request for information, develop a toolkit based on findings, write reports while contacting relevant experts and reviewers, test the toolkits, and be able to develop websites. The proposer also needs to have experience in research process improvement and redesign, workflow analysis and redesign, ambulatory clinical workflow, HIT, and HIE.
The response date for the pre-solicitation is listed as July 25, 2008. The full solicitation is estimated to be released on July 30th with full proposals due August 30th. The solicitation will be advertised on an open competition basis and will be available on www.grants.gov. When the solicitation is advertised, it will also be available for downloading from www.ahrq.gov. At that time, go to the AHRQ homepage, click on Funding Opportunities, click on Contracts, and go to RFPs. The government estimate for this proposed acquisition is $500,000 and the period of performance will be for 2 years.
For more information on the pre-solicitation or to submit questions, contact Linda Simpson AHRQ contract specialist at linda.simpson@ahrq.hhs.gov.
