The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has taken a new step to find ways to identify and test methods for improving electronic personal health information security by awarding a $1.12 million contract for a pilot to be conducted by LMI, a McLean, VA not-for-profit firm.
LMI, which focuses on government management services, will work with the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health IT to develop a laboratory for health information technology automated security endpoint testing. The pilot will review the efficacy of various field-tested methods for automating information security within clinical healthcare settings.
In the initial phase of the project, LMI will develop proof-of-concept pilot tests with electronic health records (EHR). LMI will identify EHR solutions to be considered for inclusion in the pilot tests and will validate a number of these technologies through the ONC testbed.
LMI also will develop a scalable HIT ecosystem that will model a chain of HIT events--taking into consideration factors such as including user venues, deployment size, and variations in deployed hardware.
The project is being funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and will covers the first 13 months of what is anticipated to be a two-year initiative.
For more details:
- see the LMI release