Health Department Launches $1B Innovation Initiative
WASHINGTON – The government will award up to $1 billion to fund innovative projects across the country that test creative ways to deliver high quality medical care and save money.
The Department of Health and Human Services launched the Health Care Innovation Challenge Nov. 14. The initiative will also give preference to projects that rapidly hire, train and deploy healthcare workers.
The Health Care Innovation Challenge will award up $1 billion in grants to applicants who will implement the most compelling new ideas to deliver better health, improved care and lower costs to people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP, particularly those with the highest health care needs.
The objectives of this initiative are to:
- Engage a broad set of innovation partners to identify and test new care delivery and payment models that originate in the field and that produce better care, better health, and reduced cost through improvement for identified target populations.
- Identify new models of workforce development and deployment and related training and education that support new models either directly or through new infrastructure activities.
- Support innovators who can rapidly deploy care improvement models (within six months of award) through new ventures or expansion of existing efforts to new populations of patients, in conjunction (where possible) with other public and private sector partners.
Awards will range from approximately $1 million to $30 million for a three-year period. Applications are open to providers, payers, local government, public-private partnerships and multi-payer collaboratives. Each grantee project will be monitored for measurable improvements in quality of care and savings generated.
The Health Care Innovation Challenge will encourage applicants to include new models of workforce development and deployment that efficiently support their service delivery model proposal. Enhanced infrastructure to support more cost effective system-wide function is also a critical component of health care system transformation, and applicants are encouraged to include this as an element of their proposals.
Application Information
Potential applicants must submit a letter of intent (LOI) by December 19, 2011 in order to be eligible for a funding award. Please refer to the FOA for more information on the LOI process. When you’re ready, click here to submit your LOI.
All applications must be submitted electronically through www.grants.gov. Applicants are strongly encouraged to use the review criteria information provided in the “Application Review Information” section in the funding opportunity announcement (FOA), to help ensure that the proposal adequately addresses all the criteria that will be used in evaluating the proposals.
Note: All prime awardees must provide a Dun and Bradstreet (D&B) Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number in order to be able to register in the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Subaward Reporting System (FSRS) as a prime award user. Further, registration with the Central Contracting Registration (CCR) at www.ccr.gov is also required in order to apply. Please refer to the FOA for further application information.
Important Dates
* Letter of Intent: December 19, 2011
* Applications are due, January 27, 2012
* Anticipated Award Date: March 30, 2012
**CMS Innovation Center staff will be hosting an informational webinar on the Health Care Innovation Challenge for all interested individuals and organizations on Thursday, November 17, 2011 from 2:00-3:30pm ET. Staff will provide an overview of the initiative and be available to answer questions from the audience.
Please visit the webinar site to join. No advance registration is required.
Participants wishing to only listen to audio may dial 888-567-1602 or 201-604-5049 and request “Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation Webcast” (no passcode). Reminder, participants will only be able to ask questions via chat feature online.
A recording will be available following the webinar.
For more information, please direct your questions to InnovationChallenge@cms.hhs.gov.
