Xavier Becerra United States Secretary of Health and Human Services | Official Website
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), has issued a Special Emphasis Notice (SEN) under the Leading Edge Acceleration Projects (LEAP) in Health Information Technology (Health IT) funding opportunity for fiscal year 2024. The ONC is inviting applications for projects focusing on two specific areas.
The first area seeks to develop innovative methods to evaluate and enhance the quality of health care data used by artificial intelligence (AI) tools in health care. This includes creating scalable solutions to improve the quality of health care data available in electronic health record (EHR) technologies utilized by AI tools.
The second area aims to expedite the adoption of health IT in behavioral health. This involves designing, developing, and testing lightweight health IT solutions that can boost health IT capabilities in behavioral health settings and improve care coordination between behavioral health and clinical healthcare settings.
"These two areas of interest are a natural extension of ONC’s work," said Steve Posnack, deputy national coordinator for health information technology. "We look forward to receiving innovative applications and seeing the impacts generated by selected awardees."
Earlier this year, ONC published the HTI-1 final rule which established transparency requirements for AI and other predictive algorithms that are part of certain certified health IT as part of the ONC Health IT Certification Program. Additionally, ONC and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) launched a multi-year initiative called Behavioral Health Information Technology Initiative, investing more than $20 million from SAMHSA funds to advance health IT in behavioral healthcare settings.
For fiscal year 2024's LEAP in Health IT funding opportunity, ONC plans to issue one cooperative agreement award of up to $1 million for each area of interest, totaling up to $2 million for both awards. Interested applicants are encouraged to review NAP-AX-22-001 at https://grants.gov/search-results-detail/341131 for more information.
The LEAP in Health IT funding opportunity aims to address challenges to the development, use, or advancement of well-designed, interoperable, and scalable health IT. The solutions are expected to further a new generation of health IT tools and inform the development, implementation, and refinement of health IT standards, methods, and techniques towards enabling widespread adoption of health IT tools to improve health outcomes.
