Concerns about high and ever-rising healthcare expenditures, efficiency, and quality of health care have accelerated in recent years. The Affordable Care Act has motivated public and private insurers, large employers, healthcare providers, and various research and policy centers to devise and examine new ways to structure, organize, and pay for healthcare.
However, a research study focused on a service delivery innovation intended to reduce costs may not provide enough data scientifically and may not examine cost or economic efficiency questions thoroughly. Valid replicable findings and studies considering the full range of outcomes relevant to these studies and innovations are needed.
On October 7th NIH issued Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) (RFA-RM-11-023) developed as a Common Fund initiative, to solicit high-quality, health economic research projects associated with large-scale federal and non-federal pilots, demonstrations, or other experiments in healthcare payment structure.
One of the areas of concern to researchers concerns studying innovations in the use of health information technology. This includes studying electronic health records for care coordination, especially across multiple healthcare organizations to examine the effect on efficiency, delivery, costs, and quality of care.
Eligible applicants can include higher education institutions, nonprofits, for-profits to include small businesses, and state and county governments.
NIH intends to commit approximately $2 million across this FOA and $2 million to its companion FOA (RFA-RM-11-024) also issued October 7th seeking economic studies to show how to increase the value of healthcare in projects that are currently in the planning stages but have not yet been implemented.
The plan is to fund 5 awards contingent on NIH appropriations and the submission of a sufficient number of scientifically meritorious applications. The application deadline for (RFA-RM-11-023) is February 9, 2012 and for (RFA-RM-11-024) the deadline is February 8, 2012.
Go to http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-RM-11-023.html to view (RFA-RM-11-023) and go to http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-RM-11-024.html to view (RFA-RM-11-024).
