The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has launched the Health Care Innovation Challenge, which will award $1 billion in grants in March to test inventive and compelling methods to deliver high quality medical care at lower costs to individuals enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program.
The challenge will fund projects that can start within six months. Awards will range from about $1 million to $30 million for a three-year period, according to CMS in a Nov. 14 announcement. The funding comes from the CMS Innovation Center.
Applications are open to providers, payers, local government, public-private partnerships and multi-payer collaboratives. Projects that focus on rapid workforce development will receive high priority, the agency said. All proposals are expected to define a clear roadmap to sustainability and consider scalability and diffusion of the proposed model.
Other efforts sponsored by the innovation center, such as the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement initiative or Partnership for Patients, have targeted specific and promising approaches.
The Health Care Innovation Challenge will identify and support local, new models, which, if successful, can be shared widely on a broad scale, said Donald Berwick, MD, CMS administrator.
"When I visit communities across the country, I continually see innovative solutions at the very ground level – a large health system working with community partners to decrease the risk of diabetes with nutrition programs or a church group that sends volunteers to help home-bound seniors so they can live at home," he said in the announcement.
"By putting more programs like this in place and more 'boots on the ground,' these types of programs can truly transform our healthcare system," he said.
CMS will award the grants in March 2012. Letters of intent are due Dec. 19 and applications by Jan. 27, 2012.
The challenge aims to engage a broad set of innovative partners to identify and test new care delivery and payment models that are developed in the field, said Rick Gilfillan, MD, acting director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation. CMS also wants to identify new models in workforce development and deployment and related training and education that support them.
CMS is especially interested in innovations that address the needs of high-cost, high-risk individuals, including those populations with multiple chronic diseases, mental health or substance abuse issues, poor health from socio-economic and environmental factors, multiple medical conditions, high-cost individuals or the frail elderly.