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The Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has awarded the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society and the National Opinion Research Center program awards for 2025 under the ongoing Leading Edge Acceleration Projects (LEAP) in Health IT programs.
The Sept. 23 awards are the most recent initiatives recognized by the LEAP in Health IT program, through which ASTP supports projects that can help address challenges that inhibit the development, use and advancement of interoperable health information technology.
IAS for TEFCA
For this newest round, ASTP selected HIMSS (parent company of Healthcare IT News) for a project focused on simplifying and accelerating the adoption of Individual Access Services within the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, or TEFCA.
IAS is intended to make it easier for individuals to securely access their health information by tackling three key technical and operational hurdles. HIMSS' project, which is expected to be completed in 2027, intends to simplify identity proofing by evaluating alternatives such as federated credentials and reusable identity tokens.
These efforts, according to the project description, would reduce the friction patients face in proving who they are, all while ensuring compliance with stringent security standards. The HIMSS project would also reduce the complexity of IAS implementation through reusable toolkits and workflows that ease operational burdens and encourage broader IAS participation.
FHIR subscriptions
ASTP has also chosen the National Opinion Research Center to enhance the use of FHIR subscriptions for time-sensitive, patient-centered decision support.
The center is working to enhance a prototype application for monitoring postpartum hypertension. The application automatically identifies patients for enrollment in a pregnancy-induced hypertension monitoring program and generates real-time responses to patients who report elevated blood pressure.
By leveraging FHIR subscriptions to improve patient enrollment and real-time data monitoring, the project aims to test feasibility through implementation in a clinical setting.
Lessons learned from the project, which is also expected to be completed in 2027, would inform future improvements to the FHIR Subscription specifications, according to ASTP.
Years of innovation
The LEAP in Health IT project was first launched in 2018. Since then its awardees have included initiatives exploring advanced FHIR capabilities and USCDI data quality. More recently, funding has gone to research on EHR data quality for machine learning models and IT adoption by behavioral health providers.
This year, ASTP offered up to $2 million total for two awards for the FY 2025 LEAP in Health IT award program. The funding opportunity, which closed on April 25, sought two areas of need.
Area 1 asked for proposals that would demonstrate readiness of FHIR-based Subscriptions capability as a foundational health IT capability for improved interactivity with third-party applications and Area 2 asked for projects that could identify and test technologies to increase adoption of IAS.
IAS services, which are defined as services any Qualified Health Information Network participant or sub-participant can provide to an individual to satisfy their request to access, inspect or obtain a copy of their health information, were conceived with the development of TEFCA.
However, these data exchange services have been slow to develop.
Recently, the company HealthEx and partners launched a platform for patient authentication under TEFCA that makes IAS possible, and in partnership with electronic health record vendor Epic Systems, earlier this month, turned on patient-directed access to medical records.
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
