LEAP in Health IT awards focus on AI and behavioral health

HHS, through the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy and Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, has announced two awards totaling $2 million under the Leading Edge Acceleration Projects in Health Information Technology funding opportunity.

LEAP in Health IT awardees aim to create methods and tools to advance care delivery, research capabilities and health IT interoperability.

The May 2024 Special Emphasis Notice sought applications for the following two areas of interest:

1. Develop innovative ways to evaluate and improve the quality of healthcare data used by AI tools in healthcare.
2. Accelerate health IT adoption in behavioral health settings.

"AI and behavioral health are two high-priority areas for HHS," Steve Posnack, principal deputy assistant secretary for technology policy, said in a press release. "We hope that the funding each awardee receives supercharges their entrepreneurial spirit and positions them to make a real impact in people's lives. We are cheering them on and look forward to their future results."

The first 2024 LEAP in Health IT awardee is The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, the governing board of Columbia University in New York City.

The project, "Scalable, Shareable and Computable Clinical Knowledge for AI-Based Processing of Hospital-Based Nursing Data (SC2K)," seeks to systematically use nursing knowledge to capture nursing data nuances, leading to more comprehensive, accurate and transparent algorithms.

Additionally, the study seeks to create scalable computational approaches to evaluate and improve the quality of data recorded by inpatient nurses and used in AI algorithms.

The researchers will test and validate different computational methods within a healthcare process modeling framework applied to two AI-based use cases that leverage inpatient nursing and multimodal data.

The second 2024 LEAP in Health IT awardee is Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), Oregon's only public academic health center.

The "Behavioral Health eCarePlan Collaborative Project" seeks to adapt an open-source SMART on Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) application based on the HL7 Multiple Chronic Condition care plan effort.

OHSU aims to fine-tune the MyCarePlanner/eCarePlanner applications to improve the exchange of structured behavioral health data, allowing standard storage in a supplemental data store and write-back to any EHR available. The system allows any structured data collection form to be incorporated and translated into FHIR questionnaire queries.

The project will pilot the MyCarePlanner/eCarePlanner apps to a group of behavioral health providers that use EHRs with limited health information exchange capabilities.

OHSU will perform a formal evaluation of the applications' capabilities for three key behavioral health use cases and share findings with the pilot sites and their patients, as well as groups like HL7, behavioral health peer support networks and the eCarePlan cross-agency management group.

Hannah Nelson has been covering news related to health information technology and health data interoperability since 2020.