On Feb. 25, the National Institutes of Health and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT launched the Sync for Science initiative, a pilot designed to support the Precision Medicine Initiative. Now, S4S developers will implement a standards-based workflow to connect researchers to patient data.
The workflow will be based on standards including HL7's Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources and authorization framework OAuth. This functionality, once implemented, will allow consumers to connect their electronic health information to a research app. This type of data donation is a key element of the PMI Cohort Program, a precision medicine initiative that hopes to enroll more than one million participants.
The two core goals of the S4S pilot include:
• Developing methods to facilitate individually controlled clinical data donations
• Accelerating and guiding the ecosystem for patient-mediated data access through APIs
Several EHR vendors are participating in the S4S pilot, including Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, drchrono, Epic and McKesson.