Building Ocular Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) Research Capacity

Mitre Corporation, Mc Lean VA

Investigators

Abstract

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Eye Institute (NEI), Office of Data Science and Health Informatics (ODSHI) seeks the assistance of the Health Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) operator to provide independent, expert technical, analytical, and subject matter support. The Health FFRDC will provide the timely integration and application of many disciplines and functional specialties that are too broad and complex to acquire through individual, competitive procurements with commercial contractors. NEI ODSHI coordinates existing activities within the NEI, and across NIH, and other government agencies to provide a nidus for new trans-agency programs in data collection, data sharing and data interoperability. ODSHI works to accelerate scientific discovery, foster collaborative research, and ultimately improve public health through the application of scientific data and knowledge management in the eye health sciences. The NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science seeks to improve the biomedical data science ecosystem to fully utilize the vast amount of data relevant to biomedical research, including data from electronic health records (EHRs) and other healthcare-related sources. Maximizing data generation and access can accelerate biomedical discoveries and breakthroughs in medicine, leading to better health outcomes. NIH works to keep up with fast-paced changes in biomedical data science by addressing the findability, interconnectivity, and interoperability of NIH-funded biomedical data sets/resources, creating and consolidating data management tools, turning algorithms and tools into enterprise-ready resources, and decreasing data management costs. As a crosscutting theme, data sharing is essential for expedited translation of research resources into knowledge, products, and procedures to improve human health. It enables researchers to more vigorously test the validity of research findings, strengthen analyses by combining data sets, and explore new frontiers. Data standards are key to the reusability of data, allowing data to be more easily analyzed, shared, and combined. Specifically, this work will build FHIR for research capacity of NEI extramural investigators and their institutions. This will support ODSHI’s goals of accelerating scientific discovery and fostering collaborative research in eye health sciences through enhancing research data interoperability and reproducibility. The purpose of this contract is to develop FHIR for research capacity-building modalities for the ocular community to: Support the development of data sharing, interoperability infrastructure, and human resources required to conduct clinical and translational research in the eye health sciences.