The Office of the National Coordinator for HIT has announced a new program called “Investing in Innovations (i2) Initiative” to spur innovations in health IT. The program will award prizes and conduct competitions to accelerate the development of solutions around key challenges in health IT.
The i2 initiate is made possible by funding from the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010. As part of the initiative’s rollout, ONC has awarded nearly $5 million to the Capital Consulting Corporation (CCC) and Health 2.0 LLC to fund projects supporting innovations in research and to encourage health IT development through open innovation mechanisms like prizes and challenges.
Examples of health IT competition topics developed in consultation with CCC and Health 2.0 LLC, includes:
• Applications that allow an individual to securely and effectively share health information with members of their social network
• Applications that generated results for patients, caregivers, and/or clinicians by providing access to rigorous and relevant information that can support real needs and immediate decisions
• Applications that allow individuals to connect during natural disasters and other emergencies
• Tools that facilitate the exchange of health information while allowing individuals to customize the privacy allowances for their personal health records
Another component of the i2 Initiative will support analysis of the current health IT environment in an effort to track and model clusters of innovation. All of this will be done while simultaneously identifying connections between disparate innovator communities. This effort will identify technology development trends in a fast-moving sector to provide information on future advisory and policy-making activities.
The i2 initiative will consult with hospitals, doctors, consumers, payers, states, employers, advocates, and relevant federal agencies to obtain direct input on execution and to build partnerships. CCC and Health 2.0 LLC along with other contributors will help provide detailed and up-to-date analysis of relevant emerging innovations and associated trends to help ONC and other HHS agencies better understand these developments as well as the issues that surround them.
Go to http://healthit.hhs.gov/portal/server.pt/community/healthit_hhs_gov_onc/1200 for more information available on the ONC homepage.
