CRICO Risk Management Grant Program 2014

Cambridge, MA, September 2, 2014 —CRICO, a recognized leader in evidence-based risk management, owned by and serving the Harvard medical community, is pleased to announce a Request for Applications (RFA) to advance our commitment to patient safety. This RFA is designed to support identification, evaluation, and implementation of solutions in patient safety that align with identified areas of malpractice risk. Funding priority will be given to proposals that are original, evidence-based and directly aimed at improving patient safety, reducing malpractice risk that is scalable with thoughtful consideration to operational sustainability within the organization. This includes proposals that (a) examine specific domains of malpractice risk and patient harm while assessing the factors at various levels that contribute to such risk (b) investigate intervention strategies at individual, systems, and organizational-levels to help reduce and eliminate specific patient harm and malpractice risk and (c) disseminate proven solutions to reduce malpractice risk. It is anticipated that knowledge gained from these projects will help develop strategies that positively affect care delivery and promote risk reduction.

Priority Areas

Applications must match one of the specified priority areas. Please note in your Letter of Intent which target area you plan to address and which type of grant best defines your proposal’s intent:

Primary Care (Specific Focus-Diagnosis): address new primary care delivery models aimed at mitigating risk in the primary care environment. These models include patient center medical home (PCMH) and team-based practice redesign, as well as strategies to mitigate errors of cognition often seen in cases involving delays in diagnosis.

Community Affiliation and Acquisition: identify strategies to improve physician engagement as it relates to organizational network expansion, the evaluation of information technology infrastructures to support additional community/practice inclusion, and the development of core patient safety guidelines that can complement CRICO’s existing underwriting requirements.

Health Information Technology (HIT): demonstrate or explore the effectiveness of decision support tools and other IT functions to improve patient safety and/or to enhance decision making and avoid diagnostic failures at the point-of-care, evaluating the potential positive, as well as unintended or negative consequences of the use of Health Information Technology. Evaluation of emerging technologies such as taxonomies that describe HIT-related medical errors, robotics, genomics and Telehealth is also of interest.

Population Health and Data Analytics: investigate new and innovative ways to leverage malpractice claims data with external data sources such as population registry data, administrative data, billing data, EHR data, clinical data repositories, and other referential data sets to identify leading indicators of safety and malpractice risk. Explore and demonstrate ways to extract knowledge from free text, such as malpractice claims files, as well as using malpractice and/or provider data for predictive analytics.

Patient Engagement: address patient engagement as a key component towards improving patient safety. Areas of concentration may include the evaluation of risks/benefits of patient portals, patient engagement in advance care planning, and novel approaches towards understanding and managing patient expectations.

Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs): develop transitional care models that address data/information sharing across established networks (including bi-directional communication); develop risk management tools that identify current and emerging clinical and operational risks, including physician integration.

Education: enhance existing educational strategies for Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation (OPPE/FPPE as well as Maintenance of Certification (MOC).

Surgery, Obstetrics and Emergency Medicine: choose a specific clinical domain among these specialty areas (Surgery, OB, ED) and investigate/evaluate the impact of care delivery models that integrate advanced practice clinicians (NPs, PAs, and CNMs) in the care delivery process.

The RFA is offered to (CRICO-insured) members from all levels of experience. Partnerships across CRICO-insured organizations will be encouraged. Submissions that contain designs to further impact enterprise risk and emerging patient safety issues will also be encouraged.

RFA Timeline

September 2, 2104 RFA announcement

September 22, 2014 Deadline for Letter of Intent

October 10, 2014 Invitations for full applications

November 21, 2014 Deadline for full applications

March 2015 Final proposals presented for Board Approval

April 2015 Notice of Grant Award

Project Duration and Funding

Support will be provided for no more than two years, with a total budget not to exceed $200,000 (per award). CRICO principal investigators must agree to dedicate at least five percent annualized effort to approved projects during the grant cycle. All research is to be conducted at CRICO member health care organizations, with written notification from these organizations acknowledging the support and approval. Applicants with proposals requiring greater than $200,000 to meet the project’s aims will need to demonstrate proof of co-funding.

The Letters of Intent will be reviewed internally by CRICO to determine alignment with CRICO’s mission and targeted areas of funding interest. Proposals deemed most congruent with CRICO’s objectives will be invited to submit a full-length, detailed proposal for peer review. Institutional subject matter experts within each target area will serve as reviewers. Final Proposals selected by the review committee will be submitted to the CRICO Board of Directors in March 2015 for funding consideration and approval.

If you have any questions regarding this announcement or requirements for the letter of intent, please refer to our website at www.rmf.harvard.edu/grants or contact Carol Keohane, Assistant Vice President, at 617-679-1415 or Amanda Maninos, Grants Administrator, at 617-679-1511. The grants team can also be reached by email at [email protected].