Earlier this month, the ONC announced two awards totaling $2 million in new award funding for the most recent innovation projects under its Leading Edge Acceleration Projects in Health Information Technology (LEAP) initiative.

For this year, the ONC put a special emphasis on exploring the use of advanced HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) capabilities, as well as identifying data quality improvements for United States Core Data for Interoperability data elements.

New York's HEALTHeLINK and Boston Children's Hospital were named this year’s LEAP winners, and here’s more about what why they won, according to the ONC:

• HEALTHeLINK: The Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO) for western New York seeks to demonstrate advanced FHIR capabilities to solve the complex problem of having advance care planning documents aggregated from disparate sources so they are accessible electronically at the point care.

•   Boston Children's Hospital: The hospital’s CumulusQ project seeks to cultivate an interoperable health IT ecosystem that enables easy access to high-quality, standardized healthcare data, with a particular focus on the USCDI in FHIR format.

“We are eager to see these new awardees get started and what they can do leveraging FHIR and USCDI,” said Steve Posnack, deputy national coordinator for health information technology, in this press release.

As highlighted in this recent Healthcare IT News , the ONC launched the LEAP in Health IT Program five years ago to fund leading-edge research on a variety of clinical and technological imperatives.

These include decision support at the point of care, population-level data-focused APIs, tools to make electronic health records more AI-ready, referral management strategies that address social determinants of health and more.

Congratulations to HEALTHeLINK and Boston Children's Hospital for being named this year’s ONC LEAP Award winners. We look forward to tracking how both of these care organizations will use the funds to advance health data exchange and overall data quality.

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