The Office of the National Coordinator on December 3rd released information on state grants available through ARRA to fund the “Health Information Exchange Challenge Program”. Five challenge areas have been identified to:
• Achieve health goals through health information exchange
• Improve long term and post-acute care transitions
• Enable patients to have access to their own health information
• Develop tools and approaches to search for and share granular patient data such as specific lab results for a given time period
• Foster strategies for population-level analysis
The awards will fund technology and approaches to be developed in pilot sites where the information and data will be shared, reused, and leveraged by other states and communities to increase nationwide interoperability.
Awards will range between $1 million and $2 million each and will be in the form of supplemental funding to the State Health Information Exchange Cooperative Agreements which have provided approximately half a billion dollars to states and State designated entities to enable health information exchange. Total funding for this initiative is approximately $16 million with ten awards anticipated.
State governments are eligible to apply plus current direct grant recipients of State Health Information Exchange Cooperative Agreement Program are also eligible.
Applications for the HHS funding notice (EP-HIT-10-002) are due by January 5, 2010. For more information go to www.grants.gov or email Bianca Costa, Grants Management Officer at Bianca.costa@hhs.gov or call (202) 205-5621.
