The Shumlin administration has announced $2.6 million in health care reform grants to seven organizations.
The grants, revealed on Friday, will support initiatives to align doctor and hospital payments with quality outcomes, increase coordination within the health care system and create an interoperable electronic medical records system to support the sharing of patient information across organizations.
“These are proposals that came from providers that are demonstrating collaboration and innovation,” said Georgia Maheras, director of the Vermont Health Care Innovation Project, adding that she’s excited to see the buy-in on health care reform from providers throughout Vermont.
The Vermont Health Care Innovation Project (VHCIP) is funded by a $45 million federal grant health care innovation grant. This is the second round of subgrants bringing the total to $5.2 million.
The federal grant runs through the end of 2016, and is ultimately intended to improve public health and reduce per capita health care costs.
In addition to the subgrants, VHCIP intends to spent a total of $12 million on improving the state’s health data infrastructure and analysis, $10 million on personnel and overhead, and $1 million to support telehealth and telemonitoring.
The subgrant award winners announced Friday are:
- $400,000 to the RISE Coalition for the development of a community-wide, multi-stakeholder campaign to improve the health of Franklin County residents;
- $193,000 to the Developmental Disabilities Council and Green Mountain Self Advocates to improve delivery of health services to adult Vermonters with developmental disabilities;
- $900,000 to the Vermont Program for Quality in Health Care to improve the quality of surgical care in Vermont and reduce complications from surgery;
- $400,000 to Southwestern Medical Center to support patient self-management of chronic conditions in southwestern Vermont;
- $500,000 to providers in Central Vermont to expand substance use screening, intervention and treatment protocols;
- $200,000 to Healthfirst to enhance the capacity of independent physicians to participate in health care innovation;
- $60,145 to InvestEAP, with King Arthur Flour, to test the return-on-investment of behavioral health screening and follow-up in the workplace.
