IRVING, Texas, Sept. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- The VHA Health Foundation has awarded grants to six health care providers that responded to the Foundation’s 2004 call for proposals, “Creating Better Health Through Innovation.” The Foundation’s board of directors approved grant awards totaling $1 million to fund promising health and health care initiatives at the local level. The Foundation’s goal is to foster innovation and spread good ideas throughout the health care industry. Grant activities will be completed by Dec. 31, 2005.
Grant Recipients -- Frances Mahon Deaconess Hospital in Glasgow, Mont., in cooperation with the Montana Health Network, received a grant to adopt a mobile clinical education delivery system that will feature a state-of-the- art human patient simulator. The system will provide a participative and interactive learning environment for physicians, nursing staff and emergency response personnel to maintain clinical proficiency and speed the dissemination of new treatment skills in Montana’s smallest rural and frontier communities. -- Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., received a grant to implement a new prototype for innovating in health care dedicated to identifying, developing and measuring the impact of innovation in the ambulatory setting. The program, dedicated to improving efficiency, effectiveness, safety and the overall health of patients uses a “live clinical laboratory” to explore and test various new approaches in the outpatient health care delivery. -- Scripps Mercy Hospital/Scripps Health, San Diego, Calif., received a grant to build upon an earlier California Endowment funded project, to improve the accuracy of medication compliance through transforming a human network and adopting a newly developed electronic translator for language-specific, culturally sensitive patient instructions across the entire continuum of care. When fully developed, the translator will be available in the public domain. -- Spectrum Health, Grand Rapids, Mich., received a grant to implement “Nutritional Options for Wellness,” a community-wide collaborative approach to addressing the full range of health needs of the chronically ill and food insecure population of Kent County by providing “food prescriptions” and other coordinated services and educational programs for these patients. Various toolkits will be available as the result of the project. -- The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Md., received a grant to redesign an entire patient care system and create a new standard of care by implementing a Medical Emergency Response Teams program using automated wireless data acquisition systems interfaced with real-time data analysis software and merged with an alert system. The overall goal of the project is to reduce mortality and morbidity in hospitalized patients by identifying precursors to critical events. -- University of North Carolina Hospitals, Chapel Hill, in partnership with the American Board of Pediatrics, American Academy of Pediatrics, North Carolina Center for Children’s Healthcare Improvement and University of North Carolina’s School of Public Health received a grant to implement an “innovation community” among pediatric subspecialists that will provide a broad platform to rapidly test and deploy strategies to improve the care of children with chronic serious illnesses, as well as create a new learning module system linked to physician board re-certification.
By funding programs like these, the Foundation is demonstrating a shift in its practice of developing its own programs to improve health care to one of finding, funding and disseminating information about new, innovative programs. To encourage information exchange, the Foundation will post on its public Web site more than 450 executive summaries of the proposals that were submitted for funding consideration. This searchable database will be available in early October at http://www.vhahf.org/ .
“The broad range of topics funded by our grant program reflects the diversity in the field,” said Linda DeWolf, president, VHA Health Foundation. “The Foundation’s goal during the next 15 months is to nurture innovation by supporting these local efforts that we believe have high potential for replication and adoption and then leverage our relationships with VHA hospitals and other health industry leaders across the nation to widely disseminate the outcomes.”
“The VHA Health Foundation board was extremely pleased with the tremendous response to our 2004 call for proposals,” said John Finan Jr., president and chief executive officer, Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System in Baton Rouge, La., and Foundation board chairperson. “The volume of applications and the quality of the programs represent a strong commitment from local health care providers to finding innovative solutions to the health care issues facing us all.”
About the VHA Health Foundation
The VHA Health Foundation, located in Irving, Texas, is a public foundation created by VHA Inc., a cooperative of more than 2,200 leading not- for-profit health care organizations, to encourage leadership and innovation in addressing health and health care issues. Efforts benefit VHA member health care organizations as well as non-members. The VHA Health Foundation funds programs that focus on new approaches to health and health care that make a difference, generate synergies that bring resources to add value and enhance outcomes, and diffuse knowledge and best practices.
Contact: Lynn Gentry 972/830-0798 lgentry@vha.com
VHA Health Foundation
CONTACT: Lynn Gentry of VHA Inc., +1-972-830-0798, or lgentry@vha.com
Web site: http://www.vhahf.org/
