UCLA / DHS Safety-Net Health Innovation Awards

Purpose

The UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and the Los Angeles County Health and Mental Health Services Agencies (including DHS, DPH, and DMH) are partnering to develop and test interventions to enhance quality, efficiency and patient centeredness of care provided by the agencies. The UCLA CTSI and LAC agencies are committed to fostering the professional development of clinician-investigators and translational scientists as they strive to close the knowledge-to-practice gap in our regional healthcare delivery systems. This solicitation requests letters of intent that describe ideas for such projects. More detailed applications for funding will be solicited from a subset of the submitted intent letters.

Description of the Funding Opportunity

UCLA CTSI and the Los Angeles County Health and Mental Health Services Agencies intend to issue three grants of up to $75,000 (one foreach agency: DHS, DPH, DMH) for up to two years to support the design and small-scale implementation of interventions or augmenting existing programs within the health and mental health services agencies that will achieve the goals of quality, efficiency and patient centered care. The agencies will provide operational support for the selected projects. The partners intend to support scientific endeavors that provide value to agencies within the project period and generate results that enable project teams to seek extramural funding for larger scale implementation or further application of the strategies tested in the project. Acceptable funding mechanisms that applicant teams can seek to pursue include, but are not limited to, NIH R01, R21, R03; PCORI, AHRQ, CDC, and CMS Center for Innovation.

This RFA focuses on implementation, which refers to the systematic uptake of proven clinical treatments, practices, organizational, and management interventions into routine practice with the intent of improving health. It is expected that the proposed program will impact patients (e.g., increased access, improved experience, better health outcomes or reduced health disparities) and efficiency (e.g., improving efficiency of outpatient care, reducing use of unnecessary diagnostic testing).

Examples of healthcare impact measures include, but are not limited to, use of group visits; selective and targeted use of synchronous telehealth, especially for distant clinics/patients; optimized clinic staffing, space, and patient volume/complexity; specialty to primary care transitions after consultation; specialty chronic disease management. Examples of reducing testing include but are not limited to: applications with low specificity or low predictive value, for example: certain radiology tests (e.g., for back pain, headaches, total body scans, abdominal pain); certain lab tests (e.g., for rare or unusual conditions); sleep studies; echocardiograms.

The program is designed to support projects that: 

• Test a solution for a bona fide problem within healthcare;
• Test solution(s) aligned with the DHS’s specific infrastructure, business approach and operations;
• Involve broad participation across sites and disciplines; and
• Focus on effectiveness (i.e., whether the intervention works in real-life), as opposed to efficacy. 

This program does NOT support projects that:

• Seek to only measure or understand a problem or solution
• Are proposed as theoretically good ideas
• Involve a single discipline or single hospital or clinic
• Focus on efficacy (whether the intervention works under controlled conditions)

The proposed study design should suit the specific problem and align with LAC health and mental health services agencies’ priorities and guidelines for the RFA. Viable approaches/methods to consider include behavioral economics, design thinking, systems engineering, improvement science, and implementation science. We encourage team science in which people come together from different disciplines. We also encourage disruptive innovation, by which we mean introducing new, innovative ideas for approaches to care delivery that fundamentally transform aspects of how care is delivered and that are well suited to the population served.