HIMSS created a new program in the summer of 2008 called the Grants Advantage Program. According to Edna Boone, senior director of healthcare information systems at HIMSS, who is managing the initiative, its purpose is not only to provide healthcare IT executives with general information on the types of grants that are available, but also to give them information on all aspects of the process. Boone and her colleagues run the site (which charges a subscription fee to HIMSS members) in conjunction with a group called The Grants Office, an organization of experienced grant writers based in Rochester, N.Y.

Boone says she believes that the Grants Advantage Program will be of significant help to healthcare executives going forward. “The tool really gives them the ability to go beyond the traditional grants search engines,” she says, “because it facilitates both the searching, and also the grants management life cycle.” What's more, Boone says, “While community health centers have long been comfortable writing grant applications, the not-for-profit community hospitals historically have not been.” But, she says, there is more grant money available, and in more places, than many might suspect.

Boone concurs with Drazen on the importance of pursuing grants only for projects that would be pursued in any case. “You need to ask who your thought-leaders are among physicians and other clinicians in your organization,” she says. “You might have a physician who's intensely interested in improving care for congestive heart failure or for diabetes, for example.” Most of all, Boone says, “You look at who your clinician champions are and where your core strengths are in terms of clinical service areas.”

Academic research grants are generally easier to obtain than IT-oriented grants, but Boone says, in her experience they are also the most difficult to implement.

According to Boone, the challenge in terms of IT grants is often finding out what is available. She says that there's even money for post-implementation training uses. CIOs, she emphasizes, need to be thoughtful, creative, entrepreneurial, and persistent. “You can write a fabulous grant,” says Boone, “but you also have to make sure that people know what it is you're trying to achieve as a hospital or health system.”

As a hospital executive, Boone was instrumental in helping her former organization (which she declined to identify) obtain a $3.8 million grant from the state of New York.

Trinity Health's strategic juggernaut

One large health system whose executives have been pursuing grants strategically is the 44-hospital Trinity Health System, based in the Detroit suburb of Novi, Mich. At Trinity, the board and senior management team believe that with the size and scale of the organization comes a unique opportunity to influence the landscape of healthcare in the United States, according to senior vice president and CIO Paul Browne. “So we made a decision many years ago to pursue grants in general terms, because we felt that would provide us with some linkages with public agencies and public officials,” Browne says. “We felt that would help us demonstrate to policy makers some of the objectives we were pursuing; so we felt we could influence healthcare in the U.S. beyond just Trinity.” Pursuing grants has been one element in Trinity's broader, public policy-driven strategy.

What's more, Browne says, it's important to be strategic about how one pursues grants. Being a community hospital system, he and his colleagues recognized that it would be important to partner with experts at universities that could help provide data research expertise to measure results and outcomes. As a result, Trinity leaders partnered with academic professionals at Iowa City-based University of Iowa, and successfully applied to the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) for funding. That resulted in a grant for $1.5 million over three years called the “Rural Iowa Redesign of Care Delivery with EHR Function,” which helped link several of Trinity's rural hospitals to its Iowa flagship facility, Mercy Medical Center-North Iowa, located in Mason City, Iowa. Another AHRQ grant for $200,000 specifically funded the planning phase of the integrated EHR system to link the eight rural hospitals to Mercy-North Iowa.