Friday, January 20, 2012

Health Care Innovation Challenge Grant Program


The Centers for Medicare and & Medicaid Services, more usually referred to as CMS, is a federal government agency operating in the United States Department of Health and Human Services that is basically responsible for administering medicare programs and collaborating with state governments to administer medicaid services.

The grants and initiatives of the CMS are all aimed towards the achievement of its primary agency mission which is to guarantee health care security to all its beneficiaries.

In keeping with this mission, the Centers for Medicare and & Medicaid Services has recently established the Health Care Innovation Challenge in an effort to solicit proposals to establish interesting new models of service delivery that can potentially deliver the three-part aim of better health, better health care, and finally, lower costs through the improved quality of Medicare, Medicaid, and Children's Health Insurance Program.

The projects that'll be financed under this program should be able to pave the way towards the achievement of the following objectives:

a) Inspiring a broad set of creativity partners that would help in the process of determining and evaluating new care delivery and payments models that are all primarily based on areas that concentrate on producing better care, better health, and the reduction of costs through substantial improvements for the benefit of the identified target populations.

b) Identifying new models of work-force development, deployment, and related training and education programs and initiatives which will support new models either directly or through the utilization of new infrastructure activities.

c) Supporting able innovators who can swiftly deploy care improvement models within six months into the award period, through the creation of new ventures or the expansion of current initiatives to new populations of patients and health care centers.

Additionally, the CMS has also specified that the proposals to be submitted under this grant significantly concentrate on high cost/high-risk groups such as those communities with multiple chronic diseases and/or mental health or substance abuse issues, poor health status resulting from numerous socio-economic and environmental factors, multiple medical conditions, high cost individuals, or old age.

The Centers for Medicare and & Medicaid Services is set to administer a total amount of $900,000,000 to financially support the activities comprised in the program.

The types of establishments and organizations who are conshdered able to submit an application under this program are those of provider groups, health systems, private sector organizations, faith-based organizations, city and township governments, local governments, public-private firms, and for-profit setups.