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, 201
• 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.

To learn more about the Health Care Innovation Challenge and information about the application process please read the Funding Opportunity Announcement.

To read an overview of the Health Care Innovation Challenge, including important deadlines, please read our Fact Sheet (PDF).

To submit your Letter of Intent to Apply to the Health Care Innovation Challenge, visit the LOI page.

Let’s now transfer that concept to government.  This should be our next step, our next innovation and our next wave.  Would it not be better to provide our less fortunate citizens with electronic secure tablets that can be the delivery mechanism for payments, news, health information and opportunity? These secure US made devices could and should help to create a useful and dynamically growing community of the “new” entitled.  Electronically savvy, with services easily managed and delivered.  This concept of adding to an already cell phone reliant society will and could create a learned group of electronically aware citizens with an awareness unlike any other group in the world.

To heck with the digital divide, to heck with the Government Printing Office, to heck with the reams of paper.  Tablets for all!

I have to applaud Eric Cantor for holding tight on taxes.   I have to applaud many of the democrats for realizing this is a joint problem that requires a joint solution.  But, first things first…shed some of the newly added government jobs.  Do you realize that a $100,000 per year employee costs the government and subsequently us, the taxpayers, almost $200,000 per year?  That is approximately $100 per hour for a full work year and does not account for the addition to any retirement, 401K or other plans.
 
Our industry is built on providing expertise where none exists.  The government contracting community, whether around the beltway or the 50 state capitals, consists of the best in class consulting firms, technology providers, construction personnel, engineers, architects, and scientists.  A contractor’s cost for the same $100,000 person to government… $85 per hour or $170,000 per year… a 15% decrease in cost, while in most cases increasing the experience and expertise. Both parties…wake up, shrink government and use the contractors’ ingenuity and expertise to its fullest.