Sharp Focus Roundup

I've been thinking about the Strategic Health IT Advance Research Projects (SHARP) Program lately and plan to give an update soon on some of the progress being made. SHARP has four major efforts underway at major collaborative efforts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Texas at Houston, Harvard University, the Mayo Clinic of Medicine, and Massachusetts General Hospital. The websites for each of these projects are:

SHARP Area 1 – Privacy and Security: the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is helping develop technologies and policy recommendations that reduce privacy and security risks and increase public trust. (my Sharp Focus post)

SHARP Area 2 – Patient Cognitive Support: Innovative cognitive research is being led by the University of Texas, Houston to harness the power of health IT to integrate and support physician reasoning and decision-making as providers care for patients. (my Sharp Focus post)

SHARP Area 3 – Health Care Application and Network Design: Harvard University is leading platform-based research to create new and improved system designs that facilitate information exchange while ensuring the accuracy, privacy, and security of electronic health information. (my Sharp Focus post)

SHARP Area 4 – Secondary Use of EHR Information: Mayo Clinic of Medicine is developing strategies to improve the overall quality of healthcare by leveraging existing EHR data to generate new, environmentally appropriate, best practice suggestions.

SHARP Affiliate – Medical Device “Plug-and-Play” Interoperability Program: Massachusetts General Hospital is developing technology, software, standards, and tools to provide higher quality patient data by enabling medical device manufacturers to create products that will interoperate with other manufacturers’ devices, EHRs, and Health IT systems.

I believe that the research being done here will be a spark for innovation that can help drive healthcare into the future. I'm looking forward to the results of this research having a real world impact soon.


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