Three new initiatives at the Penn Medicine Center for Health Care Innovation were recently funded in the second round of their Innovation Grant Program. The program is designed to advance promising ideas and to promote exploration in the areas of connected and employee health. Each winner either an employee or a student at the Penn Medical Center received $5,000 and $75,000 to further develop and test their ideas. (more…)
Legislation Introduced to Help Children
On June 20, Representative Joe Barton from Texas and other colleagues introduced the “Advancing Care for Exceptional Kids Act of 2014” (H.R. 4930) to help coordinate care for children with medical complexities while on Medicaid. (more…)
CA. Health Plans Expanding CJRR
In California, more than 90,000 hip and knee replacements are performed every year and this number is expected to rise as more Americans remain active as they age. Despite the rapid growth in these surgeries, information about quality remains limited. (more…)
AcariaHealth & NurseWise Partnering
AcariaHealth a specialty pharmacy and NurseWise a provider of multilingual nursing and health education services are partnering in the ScriptAssist® for Hepatitis C, a medication adherence program. The program is designed to ensure that patients adhere to optimize clinical outcomes, collaborate with members of the healthcare team, and manage health plan spending by practicing waste management. (more…)
HHS Launches Challenge
The “EHR Innovations for Improving Hypertension Challenge” was launched by the HHS Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and co-led by CDC and CMS as part of Million Hearts®, a national initiative to prevent one million heart attacks and strokes by 2017. Evidence-based treatment protocols provide a playbook for providers to guide their selection of effective therapies for blood pressure control. (more…)
NIH Awards Grants
Six medical centers received $43 million in grants from NIH to research and diagnose difficult-to-solve medical cases. The clinical sites will conduct clinical evaluations in cases that involve patients with prolonged undiagnosed conditions. (more…)
Funding to Reduce Oral Disparities
NIH’s National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) released several Funding Opportunity Notices (FOA) on June 27, to help reduce oral health disparities in children. The FOAs include (RFA-DE-15-007) soliciting applications for the Data Coordination Center plus the companion FOA (RFA-DE-15-006). (more…)