The Health Care Innovation Challenge Enters the Next Phase

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently challenged all comers to devise the most compelling new ideas to deliver better health, improved care and lower costs to people with the most pressing health care needs.

The innovations must improve the health service along the following criteria:

• Identifying new ways of paying for health care that improve care at reduced cost and can be scaled nationally by CMS and the Department of Health and Human Services.
•  Engaging a wide variety of innovators to help come up with new and promising ideas.
•  Helping to create jobs. The Challenge gives priority to applicants that identify opportunities for job creation.
•  Encouraging “enhanced infrastructure” to support more effective system-wide function.

Theoretically, anyone can submit their innovation provided they are doctors, nurses or other care providers, hospitals, health systems, payers, technology entrepreneurs and other private sector organizations, faith-based organizations, local governments, and public-private partnerships.

Awards for projects that are tested and shown to produce cost-cutting results will range from $1 Million upwards. In total the DHHS has ring-fenced $1 Billion, through the Affordable Care Act, for grants and awards for incentivising potential applicants.

Those who have already stated their intent have until January 27 to submit their full application to www.grants.gov. There is a fairly strict process and lots of red tape has to be cut through, as is to be expected when government bodies start offering money. However, considering the usual rate at which government bodies move, the final date at which the successful applications will be given their grants for their proposals, March 30, is blisteringly close. The grants payment will begin a three year testing period, after which point the innovations will be measured against the outlined criteria with the continued implementation of the program at stake.

Throughout history the healthcare system has found success looking outside its own jurisdiction for new ideas. In the past, industrial and military sources led to big medical breakthroughs. Where the big new ideas of 2012 will come from is still yet to be seen.