HRSA-15-150 Rural Quality Improvement Technical Assistance
This announcement solicits applications for the Rural Quality Improvement Technical Assistance Cooperative Agreement. The purpose of this cooperative agreement is to improve quality and health outcomes in rural communities through technical assistance to beneficiaries of FORHP quality initiatives such as grantees, Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs), and other rural providers. Assistance will be provided in areas such as: data collection and analysis, understanding measure specifications, benchmarking and target-setting, developing and implementing efficient and effective improvement strategies, and tracking the outcomes of quality improvement efforts.
HRSA-15-145 Rural Child Poverty Telehealth Network Grant Program
This announcement solicits applications for the Rural Child Poverty Telehealth Network Grant Program (RCP-TNGP). The RCP-TNGP is a three-year pilot program to support established telehealth networks to develop innovative ways to address the unique health care challenges faced by children living in impoverished rural areas. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines poverty as having an income below a federally determined poverty threshold. Recent data from USDA indicates higher poverty rates in rural areas than in urban areas. The rural area(s) to be served will be identified by the applicant, and should be supported by the use of county and sub-county level data to describe the poverty levels in their target area and the unmet needs of children to be served. Many of the largest drivers of health care costs fall outside the clinical care environment.
HRSA-15-149 Telehealth Focused Rural Health Research Center
This announcement solicits applications for the Telehealth Focused Rural Health Research Center (RHRC) Cooperative Agreement. The purpose of this cooperative agreement is to increase the amount of publically available, high quality, impartial, clinically-informed and policy-relevant research related to telehealth. This research will assist rural health providers and decision-makers at the Federal, state and local levels by contributing to the policy-relevant evidence base of telehealth services. The awardee will provide information that includes, but is not limited to, the impact of telehealth services in rural and underserved communities on access to health care, population health, health care spending (both for payers and for the patients receiving the services), quality of care, home health, and clinical delivery of care. This would also include studies assessing the comparative effectiveness of specific telehealth services relative to in-person services in the same clinical area. The award provided through the Telehealth Focused Rural Health Research Center Cooperative Agreement is designed to provide support for a four-year research center with a specific concentration on telehealth. It is intended to provide infrastructure to support telehealth services researchers as they explore the complexities of telehealth issues. The cooperative agreement excludes biomedical research.