LEAP in Health IT Awards Target AI, Behavioral Health
The Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy and Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ASTP) is awarding $2 million to two organizations as part of its LEAP in Health IT program, which seeks to create methods and tools to improve care delivery, advance research capabilities, and address emerging challenges related to interoperable health IT.
ASTP had sought applications for two areas of interest: (1) develop innovative ways to evaluate and improve the quality of health care data used by artificial intelligence (AI) tools in health care, and (2) accelerate adoption of health IT in behavioral health settings.
“AI and behavioral health are two high-priority areas for HHS. We hope that the funding each awardee receives supercharges their entrepreneurial spirit and positions them to make a real impact in people’s lives,” said Steve Posnack, principal deputy assistant secretary for technology policy, in a statement. “We are cheering them on and look forward to their future results.”
The awardee in the AI area is Columbia University in New York City, whose project involves Scalable, Shareable, and Computable Clinical Knowledge for AI-Based Processing of Hospital-Based Nursing Data (SC2K).
Columbia notes that advanced AI methods will increasingly use data documented by nurses. Insufficient knowledge of nursing practice, nurse decision-making, and nursing workflows risks both inaccurate and undiscovered data signals. The proposed study seeks to harness nursing knowledge in a systematic way to better capture the nuances of nursing data, leading to more comprehensive, accurate, and transparent algorithms. Additionally, the study seeks to develop scalable computational approaches to evaluate and improve the quality of data recorded by inpatient nurses and used in AI algorithms.
The second awardee, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), is working on a project to accelerate adoption of health IT in behavioral health settings. The project seeks to adapt an open-source SMART on Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) application based on the HL7 Multiple Chronic Condition (MCC) care plan effort for three behavioral health use cases and pilot the application in stand-alone behavioral health clinics with challenges in exchanging health information.
The objectives include fine-tuning the MyCarePlanner/eCarePlanner applications to improve the exchange of structured behavioral health data, enabling both standard storage to a supplemental data store and write-back to any electronic health record (EHR) available. The system is built to allow any structured data collection form to be incorporated and translated into FHIR questionnaire queries.
Another goal is to connect and pilot the MyCarePlanner/eCarePlanner applications to a set of behavioral health providers with EHRs with limited health information exchange capabilities, and perform a formal evaluation of the applications’ capabilities for three key behavioral health use cases.
The results will be shared not only with the behavioral health sites and their patients, but also with a number of key groups focused on open-source tools, including HL7, behavioral health peer support networks, and the eCarePlan cross-agency management group.
