ONC has awarded a new cooperative agreement program called the High Impact Pilots (HIP).  This new approach implements HIT Standards Committee (HITSC) 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 High Impact Pilots are:

• The Health Collaborative: The Heartland Pilot is a partnership between The Health Collaborative and the Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative (SHIEC). It will use existing standards to advance a “network of networks” model as part of a Patient-Centered Data Model pilot project.
• Lantana Consulting Group: This project focuses on the implementation, testing, and refinement of the C-CDA and C-CDA on FHIR Care Plan for pharmacists (ePhCP). In this project, Lantana is partnering with the Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC) and two pharmacy management system vendors, PioneerRx and QS/1 to pilot the integration of pharmacist care plans into coordination efforts for patient care across the continuum.
• RxREVU, Inc.: This collaborative project between RxREVU, a Denver-based prescription intelligence company, and the Banner Health System plans to leverage patient-specific data shared via FHIR to reduce overall prescription drug spending, provide useful information on patient medication adherence, and operationalize organizational best practices.
• University of Utah: This community primary care project will allow clinicians and the University of Utah’s vascular surgery service that use common electronic health record (EHR) platforms to share information through a novel closed-loop surgical referrals dashboard application. This app will be designed to integrate with commercially available EHRs using the emerging Sustainable Medical Applications and Reusable Technologies (SMART) on FHIR standard.