The nation’s primary source for federally funded work on advanced information technologies in computing, networking, and software is under the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) www.nitrd.gov program.
The NITRD Program in February 2015 released the NITRD program supplement to the President’s FY 2016 budget request www.nitrd.gov/pubs/2016supplement/ FY2016NITRD supplement.pdf.
The document has information on the program, highlights of past programs, current, and planned activities. In general, The NITRD program concentrates on big data, cyber-physical systems, cybersecurity, privacy R &D, high end computing, and video and imaging.
The NITRD program works with several participating agencies such as AHRQ, CDC, DOD, FDA, IHS, NIH, NIST, NSF, ONC, and the VA on Federal R&D programs related to health IT. In 2014, the Community of Practice (CoP) group was formed to coordinate interagency information sharing for Health IT R&D (HITRD) planning.
The HITRD CoP coordinates interagency information sharing to advance IT research for use in healthcare delivery, disease management, disaster and emergency preparedness and response, and lifelong health and wellness.
The goals are to explore ideas, collaborations, and potential engagements to catalyze innovative health IT solutions to improve safety, clinical quality, and improve adverse event detection and notifications, enable health data use and interoperability, provide decision support aids for maintaining health behaviors, and develop other novel applications of IT for health
In addition, gaps will be analyzed in HITRD related to EHRs, health data access, standards, interoperability, privacy and security, patient-centered outcomes research, evidence-based decision support, simulation, data analytics, natural language processing, knowledge repositories and metadata usage, public health surveillance, patient safety, clinical quality measures, clinical trials, precision medicine usability, image quality, mobile health and wireless sensors, assistive and medical devices, and consumer health IT.
The third planned activity is to assess HITRD needs against the changing landscape of today’s healthcare system that is being transformed by the widespread adoption of EHRs, growth of big data analytics for population health, changes in care payment models, proliferation of smart apps and mobile health devices, emerging wireless health sensors and connectivity through the Internet of Things, and major scientific breakthroughs in understanding molecular processes and the role of the genome in health and disease.