American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Funding to Beacon Communities

The Beacon Community Cooperative Agreement Program will provide funding to communities to build and strengthen their health information technology (health IT) infrastructure and exchange capabilities to demonstrate the vision of the future where hospitals, clinicians and patients are meaningful users of health IT, and together the community achieves measurable improvements in health care quality, safety, efficiency, and population health. Awards will be made in the form of cooperative agreements to approximately 2 qualified non-profit organizations or government entities representing geographic health care communities. Selected communities must already be national leaders in the advancement of health IT, workflow redesign and care coordination, or quality monitoring and feedback. In addition, successful communities must have advanced rates of electronic health record (EHR) adoption and health information exchange (HIE), and the readiness to incorporate health IT to advance community-level care coordination and quality monitoring and feedback. Cooperative agreement recipients will evolve and advance their existing competencies in these three areas over a 31-month performance period. Individually and in aggregate, the Beacon Communities will generate and disseminate valuable lessons learned that will be applicable to the rest of the nation’s communities as they strive to build and leverage their health IT infrastructure for healthcare improvement.