The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has awarded Boston Children’s Hospital approximately $275,000 to address the coordination of open information about market-ready electronic health records app solutions.

The new agreement is intended to fund Boston Children’s work to develop an online app discovery site that can simultaneously streamline developers’ ability to publish their health IT applications and help providers discover and compare this kind of technology.

In early 2016, the ONC announced the Connecting and Accelerating a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) App Ecosystem vision, which included $625,000 in funding support. This vision included three goals: to help consumers get and use their data, to improve the technology user experience for providers, and to coordinate open information about market-ready electronic health record apps.

[Also: HHS and ONC post transparency data to make buying EHRs easier]

The cooperative agreement between the ONC and Boston Children’s Hospital requires the hospital to: conduct market research among the provider community to learn what discovery site users need in order to compare software enabled by Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, aka FHIR,  create an interactive resource for providers to find and compare EHR applications, and develop an innovation sandbox wherein providers can test EHR applications.

National coordinator Karen DeSalvo, MD, and CMS Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt wrote in a joint post on Health IT Buzz that the $275,000 exemplified their agencies commitment to advance innovations in health IT.

“These collaborative efforts will help build a stronger health IT ecosystem, where consumers and providers can get the health information they need, when and where they need it most,” they wrote.

ONC's Annual Meeting is happening this week in Washington, D.C. Other Healthcare IT News articles covering the event include: EHRs now nearly ubiquitous in U.S. hosptials, ONC and AHA say, DOD poised to roll out Cerner EHR in December with focus on configuration not customization and ONC's DeSalvo: Time to change the culture of interoperability and data sharing

Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com