Description of Collaborative Activity: |
Sync for Science (S4S) is a collaboration with Harvard Medical School, various electronic health record (EHR) vendors, and the United States Federal Government (National Institutes of Health and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC)). Sync for Science (S4S) is a technology for enabling individuals to donate electronic clinical and health data to biomedical research studies. S4S is working towards a provider pilot in conjunction with the All of Us Research Program (formerly known as the Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program), a national, large-scale research enterprise designed to support discoveries that increase our ability to better treat and prevent disease by enrolling one million or more volunteers. The health data to be gathered by All of Us will support research across a breadth of disciplines. The Harvard team is funded through a grant supplement supported by NIH. ONC has provided various levels of guidance including the development of privacy and security considerations for the S4S technology implementation, an effort contracted to ESAC Inc.
S4S provides participants the ability to share electronic health record-based clinical-health data with a research program of their choice via an open, read-only application programming interface (API). The S4S API is based on the Health Level 7 (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and OAuth 2.0 standards. The S4S API requires implementers to use technology that describes how app developers can access FHIR resources using OAuth 2.0. OAuth 2.0 is used to provide access control based on rules set to enforce a vendor site’s security policy. The S4S API was developed to use OAuth 2.0 to allow an application to have read-only access to all or a portion of electronic personal health information about a patient made available through an HPOs patient portal, via the patient’s authentication credentials. The S4S API enables a health provider organization (HPO) to share a subset of the Certified EHR Technology (CEHRT) Common Clinical Data Set (CCDS) data elements, consistent with the Argonaut Project FHIR profile. The S4S API was developed with the intention that it can be used in the future for other research applications. Future applications may use additional or different subsets of the CCDS data elements, as their applications require. |
Type of Collaborative Activity: |
Committee, Advisory Group, or Work Group
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