HHS announces new funding opportunities for AI and behavioral health projects
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is offering new funding for innovations around AI data quality and technology adoption for behavioral health.
WHY IT MATTERS
In a new special emphasis notice Under its ongoing Leading Edge Acceleration Projects in Health IT initiative, ONC says it is offering funding for fiscal year 2024, seeking applications related to two distinct priorities for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:
Develop innovative ways to evaluate and improve the quality of healthcare data used by artificial intelligence tools in healthcare. This area of interest focuses on developing scalable solutions for evaluating and improving the quality of healthcare data available in electronic health record technologies used by AI tools.
Accelerate health IT adoption in behavioral healthcare. This area of interest focuses on designing, developing, and testing lightweight healthcare IT solutions that can enhance the capabilities of healthcare IT in behavioral health environments and improve care coordination between behavioral healthcare and clinical healthcare environments.
Earlier this year, ONC published the HTI-1 last lineestablishing transparency requirements for AI and other predictive algorithms included in certified healthcare IT products.
Meanwhile, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration also recently launched its campaign Behavioral Health Information Technology Initiativewhich aims to invest more than $20 million in SAMHSA funds to advance health IT in behavioral healthcare settings.
The new LEAP in Health IT funding is intended to support both goals, according to ONC, which says it expects one partnership agreement of up to $1 million for each area of interest.
Applicants are encouraged to review NAP-AX-22-001 at Grants.gov learn more.
THE BIG TREND
ONC first launched the LEAP in Healthcare IT project several years ago to help stimulate innovation in many areas.
The goal is to “address well-documented and rapidly emerging challenges to the development, use, or advancement of well-designed, interoperable, and scalable healthcare IT,” according to ONC.
The agency says it is most interested in new approaches that can “promote a new generation of healthcare IT tools and inform the development, implementation and refinement of healthcare IT standards, methods and techniques to achieve a enable widespread adoption of healthcare IT tools to improve health outcomes.”
Many of the winners focused on interoperability, with projects around innovations in health information exchange, including advanced FHIR applications and USCDI data enhancements.
ON THE RECORD
“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 impact generated by selected winners.”
Mike Miliard is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.