Home Health & Hospice Week

Telehealth, staff training draw federal dollars.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services once again gave grants to many home care-focused projects for its new Health Care Innovation awards.

CMS will give more than $50 million dollars over three years to 10 home care-focused programs that aim to increase quality care and reduce costs for Medicare beneficiaries. CMS gave grants to more than 80 projects in this final batch of Innovation awards.

None of the projects mimic the traditional Medicare home care benefit, but focus on other ways to reach out to beneficiaries in the home setting. Some examples include a palliative home care program for patients with advanced cancer who aren't yet eligible for hospice (University of Penn-sylvania); multiple projects training home care workers and family caregivers to reduce rehospitalizations and achieve other goals (University of Ar-kansas and California Long-Term Care Educa-tion Center); multiple projects using telehealth to monitor medication adherence or otherwise prevent hospital readmissions (Penn again and St. Francis Healthcare Foundation of Hawaii); care management for dual eligibles with complex conditions (Johns Hopkins); and multiple projects deploying health teams in low-income communities (Eau Claire Cooperative Health Centers in Columbia, S.C. and Ben Archer Health Center in southern New Mexico).

Resource: Learn more about the grants at http://innovations.cms.gov/Files/x/HCIA-Project-Profiles-Second-Batch-Only.pdf.