The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation is hearing brief proposals in the form of Innovation Challenges for system-level healthcare innovation.Letters of Intent are due in less than 2 weeks (Dec 19th), and proposals in January.  They are interested in hearing from a wide range of organizations and partnerships with proposals for system-wide service redesign.

This is an area I'm interested in developing, whether from the US as a small consultancy (Dialogic Design) or Canada as a design professor with an army of MDes grad students in Strategic Foresight and Innovation. I believe credible winners will need to be major "primes" however, and if there is a large firm team interested, we might build or add to a team from members on the community site who bring unique capabilities to an innovation project.

The Innovation Challenge site sets the following objectives:

The Health Care Innovation Challenge will award up $1 billion in grants to applicants who will implement the most compelling new ideas to deliver better health, improved care and lower costs to people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP, particularly those with the highest health care needs.

The objectives of this initiative are to:

• Engage a broad set of innovation partners to identify and test new care delivery and payment models that originate in the field and that produce better care, better health, and reduced cost through improvement for identified target populations.
• Identify new models of workforce development and deployment and related training and education that support new models either directly or through new infrastructure activities.
• Support innovators who can rapidly deploy care improvement models (within six months of award) through new ventures or expansion of existing efforts to new populations of patients, in conjunction (where possible) with other public and private sector partners.

Some of you may be on top of this major funding opportunity, and may already be teaming. I'm always puzzled by how proprietary the business of healthcare services and design consulting is - we are, after all, dealing with public health and a public issue. And the healthcare services provider community is as NDA-tight as Silicon Valley, or worse. We are ostensibly working on service issues that, if not done well, affect lives and health. We need new business models for innovation and research transfer.

Now that I've chased any of the major vendors away with my disclosure, I'd love to speak with people interested in teaming on a transformative proposal.