CMS is providing up to $1 billion in Health Innovation Awards to support compelling new ideas on how to deliver better health, improve care, and lower costs to consumers. In May, the CMS Innovation Center announced the first batch of Health Care Innovation Awards.
The awards to be implemented in thirteen states will span a wide range of patient populations from children to the elderly. The 12 awards range from $2 million to $18 million over a three year period with average award size of $9 million.
The University of California San Francisco developed technology for several of the projects. One project known as “eConsults” is an “Electronic Consultation and Referral (eCR) platform providing access to specialty input and to several well documented gaps in primary and specialty care communication and coordination. The purpose is to provide a foundation for non-face-to-face asynchronous electronic consultations.
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) was awarded $7,125,770 to develop the project titled “eConsults/eReferrals: Controlling Costs and Improving Quality at the Interface of Primary Care and Specialty Care”.
eConsults is an asynchronous exchange initiated by the primary care provider to seek guidance from the specialists who are need to respond in less than 72 hours. This enables the in-person specialist visit to be avoided if the specialist can convert to an eConsult referral if the situation is warranted.
eCR has components integrated into the Epic EHR. One component contains a set of condition-specific referral templates across 12 medical specialties with additional surgical specialties nearing completion.
The AAMC is going to test the scalability of an eConsult/eReferral (eCR) model for implementation in five partner academic medical centers located in California, Iowa, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Another award went to the Regents of the UCSF project for $9,990,848 to implement a “Care Ecosystem” which is an innovative clinical program built on UCSF’s Memory and Aging Center’s ability to offer high quality dementia care while incorporating the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s specialized expertise in functional monitoring and rural dementia care.
The project titled “The UCSF and UNMC Dementia Care Ecosystem: Using Innovative Technologies to Personalize and Deliver Coordinated Dementia Care” covers both California and Nebraska.
The primary point of contact for patients is a Care Team Navigator (CTN) available 24/7. An innovative dashboard with both CTN and patient portals will provide efficient and personalized communication between the CTN, care team, and the patient.
There are four modules in the Care Ecosystem that includes the Caregiver Module to connect families with resources, Decision-Making Module to help with medical, financial, and safety decisions, Medication Module will track inappropriate medications and trigger a pharmacist when indicated, and the Functional Monitoring Module that will use smartphones and sensors to rapidly detect and respond to changes.
For more information, go to http://innovation.cms.gov.