Unlock Funding to Improve Children's Health Care

The goal of this funding opportunity is to establish and evaluate a national quality system for children’s health care which encompasses care provided through the Medicaid program and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). This will be accomplished by awarding 10 demonstration grants to States funded by the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009 (CHIPRA). The CHIPRA statute appropriated a total of $100 million for this funding opportunity with $20 million to be awarded each fiscal year (FY) over a 5-year period of performance. Under this funding opportunity, there is no required State match and any unused funds may roll over for use in the next FY.

The CHIPRA statute mandates the experimentation and evaluation of several promising ideas related to improving the quality of children’s healthcare. The demonstration grant projects as outlined in the statute will experiment with and evaluate the use of new and existing measures of quality for children covered by Medicaid and CHIP; promote the use of health information technology (HIT) for the delivery of care for children covered by Medicaid and CHIP; evaluate provider-based models to improve the delivery of Medicaid and CHIP children’s health care services; and demonstrate the impact of the model electronic health record (EHR) format for children on improving pediatric health, and pediatric health care quality, as well as reducing health care costs.