Health Affairs

The author is director of health policy at Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky. On May 7, the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky and the Kentucky Rural Health Association (KRHA) convened the Doing Care Differently in Rural Kentucky health policy conference. This one-day event, held the day before the National Rural Health Association’s annual meeting in... Read the rest of this entry »

The National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) Foundation, located in Washington, D.C., is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to improving the effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of America’s health care system, according to its website. Studies chosen for this funding must have strong potential to yield insights that will help improve the US health care... Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some recent foundation blog posts that caught my eye. The subjects are varied, so there is something for everybody to read! Environmental Health; Disaster Planning On April 29 Lauren Linville, a communications associate with the Health and Environmental Funders Network (HEFN), wrote on its Giving Insight blog about lessons learned during Hurricane Sandy. In “Six... Read the rest of this entry »

I covered the Grantmakers In Health annual meeting in San Francisco in March. This meeting is always a wonderful occasion for me to meet or reacquaint myself with foundation staffers from around the United States. In this round-up post, I mention some interesting points made by various speakers at the event, which had some 550... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: Additional coauthors of this blog post are Jennifer Chubinski, director of community research, and Ann Barnum, senior program officer, substance use disorders, at The Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati. In the United States, eighteen states and Washington, D.C., have passed laws to legalize marijuana for medical purposes. Six states have defeated legislation to... Read the rest of this entry »

The president and CEO and the vice president of policy and communications at the Connecticut Health Foundation describe its new approach and the successes of its grantees. Foundations often employ the twin strategies of grant making and commissioning and advancing objective policy research, but rarely do the twain meet. Since its inception in 1999, the... Read the rest of this entry »

This is a slightly modified version of a post that appeared on Health Affairs blog on January 28. Health Affairs readers may have noticed something a little different about the Narrative Matters essay in January’s issue. The essay, “To Fight Bad Suga’, Or Diabetes, My Neighborhood Needs More Health Educators,” by Joseph West of Sinai... Read the rest of this entry »

This post first appeared on Health Affairs Blog on January 23. Great struggles sometimes result in unexpected opportunities.  In the waning moments of 2012, Congress remained in session to bridge partisan divides to solve the fiscal cliff impasse with the passage of the American Taxpayer Relief Act (ATRA). Signing the ATRA into law also achieved policy change on... Read the rest of this entry »

The author previously led national quality and patient safety initiatives at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, including its twelve-year program to bring palliative care into the nation’s hospitals. She is the principal author of The Treatment Trap, The Battle Over Health Care: What Obama’s Reform Means for America’s Future, and the forthcoming book, Medicare Meltdown... Read the rest of this entry »

GrantWatch Blog invited this staffer from the Health Foundation for Western and Central New York to report on two community forums it held earlier this month in Buffalo and Syracuse. With the presidential election over and major provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) going into effect just about a year from now, what does... Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a short holiday week. So, for some light reading, read this “people post.” You likely will recognize some of the names mentioned. Happy Thanksgiving! For more personnel news, watch for my January GrantWatch column (free access) in Health Affairs. In October 2012, Don Berwick, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, received... Read the rest of this entry »

The author, director of state health policy at the California HealthCare Foundation, discusses how that funder has been working with California officials to support implementation of various pieces of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 at the state level. Federal health reform establishes the framework for sweeping changes to the nation’s health care delivery system... Read the rest of this entry »

The author, director of health policy at the Missouri Foundation for Health, blogs about a recent report released by the St. Louis–based foundation. An often overlooked part of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, Section 4302 requires that the US secretary of health and human services “ensure that any federally conducted or supported health care... Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s note: Mark Smith is the president and CEO of the California HealthCare Foundation. He also chaired the Institute of Medicine panel that wrote the report–just released today–titled Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America. Smith’s blog post below was first published September 5 on GrantWatch Blog’s “big sister”... Read the rest of this entry »

Two staffers at a Kentucky foundation report on a webinar held in July to address this important question. Today, grantmakers and some government agencies are encouraging public health departments and nonprofit health promotion organizations to “advocate for policy change,” but the line between permitted advocacy and prohibited lobbying is often unclear. The Centers for Disease... Read the rest of this entry »

GrantWatch Blog invited Jim Tallon, president of the United Hospital Fund, a nonprofit health services research and philanthropic organization, to blog about a recent “health reform and philanthropy” event held in Manhattan and his thoughts on the topic. Tallon, a policy leader himself, was a member of the New York State Assembly for nineteen years.... Read the rest of this entry »

This week, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) announced nine research grants, the results of which should help states implement various provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The Commonwealth Fund released an issue brief on progress toward getting health insurance exchanges up and running in three states. And the Empire... Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time for GrantWatch Blog’s periodic listing of job openings at foundations and other grant makers around the country that have come to our attention. This time I am adding a couple of requests for proposals (RFPs) for those who have a job but are looking for grant funding. Please make sure to verify that... Read the rest of this entry »