Health and Human Services has announced another round of awards for the ONCHIT National Health Information Network (NHIN): ‘…HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt announced today the award of contracts totaling $18.6 million to four groups of health care and health information technology organizations to develop prototypes for a Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) architecture. The contracts awarded to these four consortia will move the nation toward the President�s goal of personal electronic health records by creating a uniform architecture for health care information that can follow consumers throughout their lives.

�The Nationwide Health Information Network contracts will bring together technology developers with doctors and hospitals to create innovative state-of-the-art ideas for how health information can be securely shared,� Secretary Leavitt said. �This effort will help design an information network that will transform our health care system resulting in higher quality, lower costs, less hassle and better care for American consumers.�

Among others, Healthcare IT News is reporting that 3 contracts have been awarded under the National Health Information Network (NHIN) RFP. $3.3 million to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) for you guessed it: health IT standards, $2.7 million to The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology for certifying electronic health record software and infrastructure and finally $11.5 million to Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration to evaluate business policies, state and local laws that could interfere with electronic health records exchange. These were supposed to have been awarded in September and totaling approximately $100 million. Anonymous sources tell me that the other slots for infrastructure and exchange demonstrations were not funded at all possibly due to the hurricane Katrina response effort. However, they might be funded in the future. Linux Medical News previously reported on this massive federal request for proposal here, here and here.

Even more grants coming out, this one from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: ‘…InformationLinks: Connecting Public Health with Health Information Exchanges � a new program supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation � will fund grants to support the participation of state and local public health agencies in health information exchanges.

* Approximately 20 Grants, $75,000.00-$100,000.00 per grant for a 12-month period

* Deadline for receipt of proposals is September 7, 2005

More grant RFP’s. These are for Rural Health Information Networks. The first one is to: ‘‘…Support development of rural health networks. Grant funds are used to support activities that strengthen the organizational capabilities of these networks whose purpose is to overcome the fragmentation and vulnerablility of providers in rural areas… This one is for a Rural Health Information Network as well but is somewhat different: ‘…To provide support to entities that need assistance to plan, organize and develop a health care network because they do not have a significant history of collaboration and are not sufficiently evolved to apply for a three year Rural Health Network Development Grant…’ Both grants are $1 million or more with each award average ranging from $85,000 to $180,000

An anonymous reader sent in: Dr. David Brailer testified before the Senate Commerce Committee yesterday on his health IT activities. Dr. Brailer’s testimony interesting, especially the last sentence: ‘…NHIN Architecture We have issued an RFP to develop models and prototypes for a NHIN for widespread health information exchange that can be used to test specialized network functions, security protections and monitoring, and demonstrate feasibility of scalable models across market settings. The NHIN architecture will be coordinated with the work of the Federal Health Architecture and other interrelated RFPs. The goal is to develop real solutions for nationwide health information exchange and ultimately develop a market � particularly the supply side � for health information exchange, which does not exist today. This RFP will fund 6 architectures and operational prototypes that will maximize the use of existing resources such as the Internet, and will be tested simultaneously in three markets with a diversity of providers in each market. HHS intends to make these prototype architectures available in the public domain to prevent control of ideas and design. Through the RFP process, we encourage the development of a complete open source solution…’