Researchers at Children’s Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School are leading a $15 million grant effort to advance health IT with funding available from the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for HIT through the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) program.
The four year project led by Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, and Kenneth Mandl, MD, MPH, of the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program and Harvard Medical School will research, evaluate and prototype approaches to achieving an “iPhone-like” health IT platform model. This was first described by the researchers in a March 2009 Perspectives article in “The New England Journal of Medicine.”
The platform architecture, described as “Substitutable Medical Applications Reusable Technologies” (SMArt) architecture will provide core services and support extensively networked data from across the health system. This will enable the equivalent of the iTunes App Store for health and stand in stark contrast to the way health information systems have been designed and implemented to date. The grant funding will enable organizations across the health ecosystem to partner with the research team on efforts to translate their solutions into real-world practice.
