Standards Exploration Awards (SEA)

ONC has awarded a new cooperative agreement program called the Standards Exploration Awards (SEA).  This new approach implements HIT Standards Committee recommendations, continues ONC’s investment toward implementing the Nationwide Interoperability Roadmap, and fits within the ONC Tech Lab’s focus on pilots for standards and technology. Through this funding, awardees are able to test solutions, evaluate scalability, and identify the potential impacts of their selected standards and technology solutions.  Awardees are expected to report results September 15, 2017.

The program is intended to catalyze the implementation of standards and technology that can be used to:

• Improve the sharing of health information among health care stakeholders
• Improve care delivery
• Demonstrate how health IT can positively impact patient experience.

The awardees for the Standards Exploration Awards are:

• Arkansas Office of Health Information Technology: The Arkansas project will implement interoperable, bi-directional health information exchange with behavioral health providers.
• Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center: The Cincinnati project will explore the cost efficiencies of integrating healthcare and clinical research systems with the medical center’s electronic health record (EHR). This will enable patient data from the EHR to be used for research as well as direct patient care more efficiently.
• Sysbiochem: In collaboration with Boston Children’s Hospital, Intermountain Healthcare, and Massachusetts General Hospital, Sysbiochem is developing services to facilitate the integrated flow of data between an EHR, Laboratory Informatics System and an analytic application to help clinicians coordinate care for breast cancer patients.