Support to Fund the Evaluation of State Health Reforms
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, through the new State Health Access Reform Evaluation (SHARE) National Program, will issue a call for proposals on Monday, August 6, 2007 to support research and evaluation of state reform initiatives that focus on health insurance access. This solicitation is in support of the Foundation's activities to increase health care coverage and to evaluate reform efforts in a systematic way. The State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC) is managing the solicitation in its role as the National Program Office for the SHARE initiative.
Framework
A growing number of states are considering legislation to expand health care coverage for their residents. As states move forward with reform initiatives, lessons can be learned from new models and reform strategies. As we attempt to learn from these experiences, it is important to acknowledge that many factors, including variation in rates of employer coverage, public program coverage, and political environment, can make it difficult to apply a model from one state to another.
To understand more effectively the lessons learned through state reform initiatives, these efforts must be systematically evaluated using a common framework. SHARE will fund proposals to examine the following key policy dimensions: (1) affordability, (2) sustainability; and (3) administrative efficiency. Proposals may address either comprehensive reform efforts that incorporate a broad set of coverage expansion activities within a state, or incremental, targeted reform interventions across multiple states.
Application Procedure
Open to all qualified applicants, a call for proposals will award $5.4 million. Larger-scale grants of up to $600,000 and smaller-scale grants of up to $200,000 will be awarded. Larger-scale projects should be structured to run between 12 and 24 months, while smaller-scale projects should run between 12 and 18 months. The application process will take place in two stages. All applicants will be required to submit a brief pre-application of up to four pages. These applications will be reviewed by SHARE staff and select applicants will be invited to submit a final grant application.
Timeline
- Call for proposals released – Monday, August 6
- Optional applicant web conference – Wednesday, August 15
- Brief proposals due – Friday, September 14
- Full proposals due (by invitation only) – Friday, December 21
- Funding decisions made – March 2008
For More Information
- Detailed information regarding funding priorities will be available in the call for proposals, which will be released on Monday, August 6 and posted on the SHARE website: http://statereformevaluation.org/.
- To receive an electronic copy of the call for proposals directly, please visit the SHARE website and click “contact us”.
