As recently announced by HHS Secretary Burwell, “The CMS initiative “Transforming Clinical Practices” (TCPI) http://innovation.cms.gov/initiatives/Transforming-Clinical-Practices has been funded with $840 million. The funds will enable successful applicants to support 150,000 clinicians to test whether using a three-pronged approach to national technology assistance will help transform thousands of clinical practices to deliver better care.”
Basically, the investment funds will go to applicants who will work directly with medical providers to rethink and redesign their practices, expand the ways patients will be able to communicate with the team of clinicians, and enable EHRs to be used on a daily basis.
This initiative will help doctors obtain better access to patient information, expand the number of ways that patients are able to communicate with their team of clinicians, and help primary care providers, specialists, and the broader medical community improve coordinated patient care.
Assistance to clinicians will include but not be limited to clinicians in rural health clinics, rural community health centers, HPSA areas, and clinicians located in medically underserved populations.
CMS as a collaborative partner is going to help clinicians achieve these goals by awarding cooperative agreements to develop Practice Transformation Networks (PTN) http://innovation.cms.gov/Files/x?TCPI-FOA-PTN.pdf to help group practices, healthcare systems, and others. A Webinar for potential applicants will be held November 6 and November 20, 2014.
The PTN requires applicants to promote interoperability and the effective use of registries, EHRs, and other practice management systems to improve the coordination of care delivery between primary and specialty practices. Data must be provided to CMS through specified data collection tools on a quarterly basis.
CMS will also award cooperative agreements to networks to be formed by professional medical associations and others through Support and Alignment Networks (SAN) http://innovation.cms.gov/Files/x/TCPI-FOA-SAN.pdf. Again, Webinars on SAN will be held November 6 and November 20, 2014
Applicants are encouraged to submit Letters of Intent to apply by November 20, 2014 with Cooperative Agreement Applications due January 6, 2015.