Deadline: 11 May 2020
The Donaghue Foundation is seeking applications for its Greater Value Portfolio grant program to fund research projects for two years with a maximum amount of $400,000 per award for the purpose of advancing promising approaches to achieve a higher value healthcare system.
The goal of this program is to test approaches and tools that organizations can readily use to improve the value of the healthcare they provide to their patients and communities.
The Foundation believes value in healthcare is achieved with uniformly high quality outcomes and favorable patient experience for the money spend. Symptoms of poor healthcare value include:
- high and rising healthcare costs,
- unwarranted variation in prices,
- unaffordable cost of care burden on patients and families,
- unacceptable variation in quality, and
- lack of transparency in both price and outcomes.
Investigators conducting research to develop actionable solutions to one or more of these symptoms of low value healthcare are encouraged to apply to the Greater Value Portfolio program.
Eligible Topics
To be considered for funding, research studies must focus on improving value through promising strategies using one or more of these approaches:
- Test models of care, coverage or system change that seek to improve value by addressing one or more of the symptoms of low value.
- Reduce routine treatments, tests, and screenings for patients for whom the potential harms (including financial harm) outweigh potential benefits.
- Provide tools to help consumers make decisions about their healthcare based on value, including the cost of care to patients, in addition to other patient-centered factors.
- Promote conversations between patients and their clinicians and care teams about preferences and trade-offs related to alternative treatment options and /or out of pocket cost burden to patients and families.
- Test interventions geared to reducing racial and ethnic disparities through the provision of higher value healthcare.
Funding Information
- The Foundation intends to fund up to five Greater Value Portfolio awards in 2020.
- The Trustees will commit up to $400,000 per award plus a 10% indirect rate to each selected investigator. Because of this close link between the funded research and the potential for meaningful results to be used to help healthcare organizations achieve their strategic goals, the duration of the award is two years.
Eligibility Criteria
- The Greater Value Portfolio program places emphasis on research that is closely linked to ongoing improvement initiatives geared to achieving greater value in healthcare organizations.
- This program is open to investigators at tax-exempt research institutions in the United States.
- In order to receive the award, the applicant must partner with an organization that delivers healthcare services or be a researcher based in a research unit embedded in a healthcare organization.
Standards for Selection
The applicant will be asked to describe the following:
- How their proposed research will assess value,
- Their proposed research question and methods,
- How this study aligns with current improvement initiatives and strategic goals of the healthcare organization that is partnering with the principal investigator on this study, and
- Evidence of the principal investigator’s and the partnering organization’s ability and commitment to work together to implement new knowledge into practice and communicate new findings to audiences beyond scholarly publications.
- Equal weight will be given to each component in the review process.
In all programs, the Foundation requires applicants to demonstrate that they have reviewed their research questions, protocols, sampling, and data analyses to ensure that they do not inadvertently mask or exacerbate racial, ethnic or gender health inequities.
For more information, visit https://donaghue.org/grant-opportunities/greater-value-portfolio/