The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology has awarded $60 million in research grants through the Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects program to Harvard University, Mayo Clinic, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston to promote research and innovation in health information technology, according to David Blumenthal, national coordinator for health information technology.

“Our quest to improve the health of Americans and the performance of our health care system depends critically on the use of electronic health records (EHRs) and the electronic exchange of health information,” Blumenthal said in an email April 2.

The money will go toward solving what ONC calls “key challenges,” he said. The University of Illinois will work on the security of health IT; the University of Texas on enabling patient-centered cognitive support for clinicians; Harvard on  network-platform architectures; and Mayo on promoting the secondary use of EHR data while maintaining privacy and security.