The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today announced two awards totaling $1.5 million under the Leading Edge Acceleration Projects in Health Information Technology (LEAP in Health IT) funding opportunity. Since 2018, LEAP in Health IT awardees have sought to develop solutions to address well-documented challenges in the development, use, and/or advancement of well-designed, interoperable health IT.
ONC-supported health information data standards and application programming interfaces (APIs) are making it easier for patients to access and share their health information and are allowing health systems to integrate disparate data sources. Now, ONC would like to facilitate the leveraging of EHR data to support population-level analyses and service delivery and would like to support the integration of clinical knowledge into routine clinical practice.
The 2026 LEAP in Health IT Notice of Funding Opportunity, posted on June 16, 2026, sought applications to tackle these goals head-on, by funding innovative and breakthrough solutions critical to maximizing the potential of health IT. ONC identified three areas of interest for 2026: (1) accelerate the use of agentic AI solutions in clinical care; (2) expand Lantern’s API monitoring capabilities by integrating secure, community-driven feedback that complements existing automated checks; and (3) assess laboratory interoperability gaps to improve the adoption and use of standard terminology among small, independent laboratories. ONC received applications for Areas 1 and 3, and the application period closed on July 16, 2026.
“We are at an inflection point in healthcare, where the promise of AI is rapidly moving from experimentation to scaled application in clinical care. Through this year’s LEAP in Health IT awards, we have an opportunity to help lead that transition,” said Steven Posnack, MS, MHS, Principal Deputy National Coordinator for Health IT, ONC. “Laboratory data is among the most frequently exchanged and clinically consequential data in healthcare. Targeted improvements in how this high value, high volume data is captured, exchanged, and used can have an outsized impact on patient care. We are excited to see what the awardees will do.”
The 2026 LEAP in Health IT awardees are:
Area 1: Accelerate the use of agentic AI solutions in clinical care.
Awardee: Medstar Health Research Institute
Project: Sovereign Execution: Vigilant, Gated and Verifiable Agentic Care
Overview: Medstar Health Research Institute seeks to move the healthcare ecosystem beyond passive patient data access and into vigilant, gated, and verifiable agentic care orchestration, giving patients sovereign control over the AI executing their care. Medstar is delivering the Sovereign Execution Bridge, a first-of-its-kind, fully open-source middleware harness that safely orchestrates complex clinical follow-ups utilizing durable, long-running processes, patient-gated data pods built on the Solid protocol, and cryptographically verifiable AI routing with tamper-evident certificates.
Area 3: Assess laboratory interoperability gaps to improve the adoption and use of standard terminology among small, independent laboratories.
Awardee: Regenstrief Institute, Inc.
Project: A Readiness-to-Remediation Toolkit for Standardized Laboratory Terminology Adoption in Small, Independent Laboratories
Overview: Regenstrief Institute, Inc. seeks to recruit at least three representative small, independent laboratories and guide each through a structured and scalable implementation framework that progresses from readiness assessment to data quality assessment, targeted terminology data quality improvement, implementation validation, and long-term sustainability. The project will evaluate laboratory readiness, identify terminology and interoperability gaps, perform structured root cause analyses, implement laboratory-specific remediation strategies, and measure improvements in semantic interoperability.
More information about LEAP in Health IT projects can be found on healthit.gov, by following ONC on LinkedIn, or by following @ONC_HealthIT on X.