AHRQ Special Emphasis Notices in Health IT Safety

AHRQ Special Emphasis Notices in Health IT Safety

AHRQ Special Emphasis Notices in Health IT Safety to fund projects promoting safer health IT practices

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has published two Special Emphasis Notices (SENs) to support projects to generate new evidence on safe health IT practices that could be used by other federal agencies to inform health IT certifications and other forms of policy guidance. In the FY2014 enacted appropriation, Congress provided an additional $4 million in AHRQ’s health IT funding for research on the impact of health IT on patient safety.

The (R01) Special Emphasis Notice is specifically interested in projects that promote post-deployment safety testing of EHRs for high prevalence, high impact EHR-related patient safety risks and focused research demonstration projects that provide evidence to inform the safe use of health IT.

The (R21) Special Emphasis Notice is particularly interested in applications whose specific aims address any of the following:

• Clinical Patient Safety: Clinical patient safety topics impacted most by health IT
• EHR System Integrity: Frequency of and optimal mitigation strategies for EHR downtimes
• Health IT safety reporting: Optimal health IT patient safety reporting strategies

AHRQ will prioritize funding of applications that address at least one of these subjects.

To learn more about the R01 funding opportunity, visit http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PA-13-045.html.

To learn more about the R21 funding opportunity, visit http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/pa-files/PA-14-001.html.