Four major academic institutions will receive $15 million each in federal funding to promote research and innovation in health IT, under the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) program authorized by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Another 16 universities and junior colleges will share $84 million in government grants to support training and development of more than 50,000 new health IT professionals, HHS has announced.

The SHARP grants will go to: the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to develop new security and risk-mitigation technologies and policies; the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, to focus on patient-centered cognitive support for clinicians; Harvard University, to study new healthcare application and network platform architectures; and the Mayo Clinic, to promote secondary uses of EHR data for quality improvement, while also protecting patient privacy and security.

"These projects will be conducted by multidisciplinary teams led by recognized public and private sector leaders in health, including researchers, the technology industry and healthcare providers," national health IT coordinator Dr. David Blumenthal says of the SHARP program in another of his public letters. "The results of these diverse teams' work will be translated into practice to produce innovative health IT solutions that can be deployed nationwide. This is not ivory tower research; its goal is to quickly infuse the dynamic health IT sector with new thinking, ideas, and solutions."

Both groups of awards are part of the $2 billion in discretionary funding that ARRA gives to ONC.

For greater detail:
- take a look at this CMIO story
- see this HHS press release
- read this letter from Blumenthal, as published in Health Management Technology

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