HIT 'breakthrough' grants should yield practical uses

Potential applicants for $60 million in grants to conduct advanced research in health information technology learned that any of their findings should be able to be put to practical use quickly to help extend the meaningful uses of electronic health records. The Office of the National Coordinator, which provided more details of its Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) program to fund "breakthrough" research in health IT, will award four grants in March of about $15,000 each to create four interdisciplinary research program sites. Each site will target one of four difficult hurdles to overcome in enabling the widespread use of electronic health record systems, ONC said when it first announced the program last month. Those include health information security, clinical support for physicians, health information exchange and population health. The research sites will work with a variety of organizations to translate their findings into products and tools that can be put into use quickly to improve health IT, said Dr. Charles Friedman, ONC's chief scientific officer.