HHS Awards Millions to Improve Healthcare

In June, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded nearly $156 million in funding to support 420 health centers in 47 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to increase access to integrated oral healthcare services and to improve oral health outcomes for Health Center Program patients. The funding will provide enough money to hire approximately 1,600 new dentists, dental hygienists, assistants, aides and technicians to treat nearly 785,000 new patients.

Then, in September, HHS awarded more than $87 million for IT enhancements in 1,310 health centers in every U.S. state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the Pacific Basin. The funding will support health information technology enhancements to accelerate health centers’ transition to value-based models of care, improve efforts to share and use information to support better decisions, and increase engagement in delivery system transformation. To support those goals, all purchases or upgrades of electronic health record systems made with the funding must use technology that is certified by the Office of the National Coordination for Health Information Technology.