HHS Investing in Innovations (i2) Initiative

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) announced the Investing in Innovations (i2) Initiative – a bold new program designed to spur innovations in health IT. The program centers on prizes and competitions to accelerate the development of solutions and communities around key challenges in health IT.

The initiative is the first Administration-wide program using prizes and challenges to advance an agency's mission made possible by the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, signed into law by President Obama on Jan. 4, 2011. The Act invests in innovation through research and development and seeks to improve the competitiveness of the United States.

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 encouraging health IT development through open-innovation mechanisms like prizes and challenges. The i2 Initiative will consult stakeholders across the health care sector including hospitals, doctors, consumers, payers, states, employers, advocates, and relevant federal agencies to obtain direct input on execution and to build partnerships. The core of the i2 Initiative is an effort to use prizes and challenges to facilitate innovation and obtain solutions to identified health IT challenges. Recognizing the promise of prizes and challenges, the President has called on agencies to promote innovation by using such innovation tools to address intractable problems. The use of prizes and competitions is widely regarded as a powerful tool to attract innovators from all walks of life to address hard problems with the added benefit of only rewarding best-in-class work. The approach makes possible rapid response to emerging issues that are difficult to address with more traditional funding approaches.