Health Care Innovation Challenge
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.
Important Dates
- Letter of Intent: December 19, 2011
- Applications are due, January 27, 2012
- Anticipated Award Date: March 30, 2012
Webinar Reference Materials
- Health Care Innovation Challenge Webinar 1 - Overview: November 17, 2011
- Health Care Innovation Challenge Webinar 2 - Health Care Innovation Challenge Webinar: Webinar: Designing Effective Project Proposals: December 6, 2011
- Health Care Innovation Challenge Webinar 3 - Achieving Lower Costs Through Improvement: December 13, 2011
- Health Care Innovation Challenge Webinar 4 - Measuring Success: December 19, 2011
Application Information >>
Frequently Asked Questions >>
Additional Information
To learn more about the Health Care Innovation Challenge and information about the application process please see the Fact Sheet (PDF) and the Funding Opportunity Announcement (PDF).
Page 38 of the Funding Opportunity Announcement includes a "Financial Plan Template" to be filled out and included in your application. In addition to the description in the FOA, "Webinar 3: Achieving Lower Costs Through Improvement," which can be viewed through the links seen above provides further clarification on completing the Financial Plan. You can also download the Financial Plan Template as an Excel file here. If you use assistive technology and are having trouble accessing or using this document, please contact us and we will assist you.
To submit your Letter of Intent to Apply to the Health Care Innovation Challenge, visit the LOI page.
To find information on health care costs, health status, and other data that may be useful in completing project proposals for the Health Care Innovation Challenge, please view these free and widely available resources (PDF). Note: this is not a required or exhaustive list of resources that may be used to help find information pertinent to applications.
For more information, please direct your questions to InnovationChallenge@cms.hhs.gov.
Update: Please be sure to view the FAQs page prior to emailing us. We are getting a lot of inquiries and are unfortunately not able to respond to all of them as quickly as we'd like. We are currently prioritizing the questions which are not already answered on this website.