HHS www.hhs.gov has selected 5 entrepreneurial projects for investment by the Secretary’s Ventures Fund www.hhs.gov/idealab/ventures-fund. The projects were chosen from across HHS and are part of the latest round of funding and support designed to advance the innovation agenda at HHS.
HHS Ventures is a competitive effort to provide funding and support to HHS employees with proven ideas on how to dramatically improve their office and agency. This year, HHS Ventures was supported with funding by the Office of the Secretary, CDC, NIH, FDA, and CMS.
The Ventures Funding provides up to $100,000 for each project, fifteen months of support and guidance, a suite of tools typically not available to staff, and technical support to help implement the project.
One of the projects titled “The Fight against Zika: Leveraging HIT” involves the Office of the National Coordinator for HIT and CDC as partners to combat the devastating effects of the Zika virus.
An important part of a patient’s care can be the lab testing and results that accompany a visit to a clinician. Most systems have the ability to establish contact between commercial labs and providers, but generally public health labs do not have the ability to exchange this information electronically.
Since almost all Zika tests are performed at public health labs, the orders, test results, and additional information such as pregnancy status, are either sent via paper or by telephone. This project if successful would enable public health labs to provide efficient data transmission for orders and results in a faster and more efficient way.
Go to https://www.hhs.gov/about/agencies/octo/index.html for more information on the other four projects.