Web Exclusive: IHE-RO receives state of Florida grant
By Nicole Napoli, publications specialist
The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise – Radiation Oncology has been awarded a $680,000 Florida Biomedical Research Award for two years beginning January 1, 2010, to expedite the development of interoperability standards and build test tools software to accomplish interoperability goals in the field of radiation oncology to reduce medical errors.
“There are significant interconnectivity and interoperability issues in radiation oncology, which are basically slowing down the development of comprehensive electronic health records for cancer patients,” Jatinder Palta, Ph.D., co-chair of the IHE-RO committee and professor and chief physicist at the University of Florida College of Medicine, said.
IHE-RO was established in late 2004 as a domain of the larger Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) program, a global initiative now in its 11th year that creates the framework for passing vital health information seamlessly across multiple healthcare enterprises. In addition to radiation oncology, there are operational domains in eye care, cardiology, radiology and patient care devices, among others.
Dr. Palta and May Wahab, M.D., chair of the ASTRO Healthcare Access and Training Subcommittee and an associate professor of radiation oncology at the University of Miami Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, originally applied for a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Challenge Grant, which is awarded to support research on topic areas that address specific scientific and health research challenges in biomedical and behavioral research that would benefit from significant two-year jumpstart funds.
Only 200 grants are awarded and while the IHE-RO grant application received a good review, it did not have a high enough score to secure funding, Dr. Palta said.
After Challenge Grants were awarded, the state of Florida decided to fund, at the same level as NIH, the top 20 applications from Florida that had not been accepted by NIH but had received good scores, which included Drs. Palta and Wahab’s proposal.
The grant will be used to fund the IHE-RO project and the IHE-RO Planning Committee, which has previously been supported by ASTRO, including hiring a computer scientist with expertise in connectivity standards to help develop test tools, help with the Connectathon and promote interoperability and interconnectivity in the radiation oncology community.
“The Florida Biomedical Research Award basically takes the burden off of ASTRO in terms of financially and will expedite the process of interconnectivity,” Dr. Palta said. “The ultimate goal is that we would have universal health records for cancer patients and would have radiation oncology equipment talking to each other.”
The work toward universal electronic health records for all patients has already begun on a federal level. In early 2009, President Barack Obama signed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or the stimulus package, to encourage the adoption of electronic health records through incentive payments to physicians. ASTRO will submit official comments to the federal government in March with the goal of helping radiation oncologists qualify for the incentive payments.
Dr. Palta said it is a distant goal of the IHE-RO Planning Committee that through the work accomplished by the state of Florida grant and the annual Connectathon, IHE-RO might one day become the certifying entity for radiation oncology for incentive payments offered under the HITECH Act.
“It’s all headed in that direction,” he said.
Later this year, the federal government will issue criteria for electronic health record certifying bodies under the HITECH Act.
For more information on IHE-RO, visit http://wiki.ihe.net/index.php?title=Radiation_Oncology. For more information on IHE, visit www.ihe.net.
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