On Wednesday, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the launch of a $235 million initiative to support community-based models for electronic health record adoption, Federal Computer Week reports (Lipowicz, Federal Computer Week, 12/2).
Of the funds, HHS will award about $220 million as grants to 15 not-for-profit community groups or government entities representing diverse geographic areas. About $15 million of the funds will go toward technical assistance and program evaluation (Gruenwald, "Tech Daily Dose," National Journal, 12/2).
Grant Program Details
The initiative, called the Beacon Community Cooperative Agreement Program, aims to bolster health care organizations that already use EHRs and health data exchange systems. The grant recipients also must already serve as national leaders in health IT adoption, care coordination, quality monitoring and other related fields.
Officials said the grant program will help these early EHR adopters serve as "beacons" for health IT implementation in their local communities. They said the beacon model also could help lay the foundation for a national health IT infrastructure (Mosquera, Government Health IT, 12/2).
National Coordinator for Health IT David Blumenthal said the grant recipients also should plan to coordinate their health IT efforts with the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs. The initiative will issue three grants to organizations that plan to work on the agencies' joint Virtual Lifetime EHR (Brewin, NextGov, 12/2).
Officials said grant recipients also should plan to coordinate with regional health IT extension centers, state health information exchanges and other federal health IT initiatives.
Timeline
Applications for the Beacon Community program are due on Feb. 1, 2010.
Officials plan to award the grants in March 2010 (Goedert, Health Data Management, 12/2).
Column
On Wednesday, Wisconsin Technology News published a guest column authored by Blumenthal about the Beacon Community grants (Blumenthal, Wisconsin Technology News, 12/2).