The HL7® Fast Heathcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR ®) at Scale Taskforce (FAST) initiative has officially left the nest and taken flight!  In 2017, ONC spearheaded the FHIR at Scale Taskforce, a public-private partnership with industry stakeholders, to accelerate the scalability of FHIR across the industry. Since its inception, FAST grew larger and shifted focus from identifying FHIR scalability challenges to proposing new solutions, including new standards development, so it made sense for FAST to find a new home. It did not have to fly far – FAST is now an official HL7® FHIR Accelerator. ONC is pleased to recognize this important milestone!

The Sync for Genes program, launched by ONC in 2017 in partnership with the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, aims to enable the sharing of standardized genomic information among laboratories, providers, patients, and researchers by advancing the development and use of industry-supported standards, such as the Health Level Seven International® (HL7®) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources® (FHIR®) standard.

ONC launched the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee (HITAC) Adopted Standards Task Force to review and make recommendations on the existing set of ONC-adopted standards and implementation specifications. 

The same basic technology that can predict what movie you might want to watch, what song you might want to listen to, or what item you might want to buy online, can also predict the onset of diseases, forecast costs of care, and recommend treatment options for your doctors, nurses, and pharmacists.

ONC published a notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) under the Leading Edge Acceleration Projects (LEAP) in Health Information Technology (Health IT) funding opportunity NAP-AX-22-001. The goal of the funding opportunity is to advance health IT standards and tools to improve social determinants of health data (SDOH) exchange and research, and to develop tools for making electronic health record (EHR) data for research and artificial intelligence (AI)-ready.