Edmond Scientific Wins 2017 FedHealthIT Innovation Award

June 2017 – Edmond Scientific Company (ESC) is the recipient of a 2017 Federal Health Information Technology (HIT) Innovation Award for its role in advancing HIT. The FedHealthIT Innovation Awards, held on June 6th, comprised more than 250 federal health leaders from government and industry to recognize 25 of the top federal health programs and teams behind innovation efforts at Veterans Affairs, Military Health, Health and Human Services, and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Nominated and chosen by their peers, the awardees stand out based on their willingness to take on achievable risk, and more importantly, to deliver real results in support of their mission.

ESC won the award based upon its work leading research and development (R&D) activities in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Emerging Health Technology Advancement Center (EHTAC). EHTAC evaluates and advances emerging technologies for application in the VA to improve clinical outcomes, efficiency, performance, decision-making, and security and privacy. EHTAC is a lab environment used to conduct investigations of emerging technologies or trends expected to mature within a 5-year window. A key focus is leading VA interoperability pilots and demonstrations. Through EHTAC, ESC has led the development and transition of technologies into enterprise capabilities in the VA for such capabilities as enabling patient choice and control over the sharing of their health data through the enforcement of consent, runtime data segmentation and protection of structured and unstructured sensitive information in documents and data flows, data tagging capabilities to map ontologies to clinical decision making systems, advancement of role-based and attribute-based access control architectures to maximize capabilities of enterprise commercial security products purchased by the VA, and federated security architectures that provide for the synchronized application of access control rules and policies across organizational boundaries and disparate systems and protocols. In short, ESC R&D through EHTAC has led to greater empowerment and choice for veterans as patients over their care, and has provided greater and finer privacy and protection of their information in a large health enterprise such as the VA, without impeding information sharing and speed of access needed to deliver care.