Sickle Cell Disease Grants

Demonstration to Increase Hydroxyurea Prescribing for Children with Sickle Cell Disease Through Provider Incentives

Grant period: 2020-2023

The Demonstration to Increase Hydroxyurea Prescribing for Children with Sickle Cell Disease Through Provider Incentives initiative will support the awarded project to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of providing financial incentives to providers to improve the quality of life of children with sickle cell disease (SCD) through increased prescription rates of hydroxyurea. The awarded project will build the capacity of State Medicaid Offices and other partners to achieve the following three goals:

1. Develop performance measures for hydroxyurea prescribing for the three main provider types that care for children with SCD (i.e., hematologists, primary care providers, and emergency clinicians),
2. Develop and implement an incentive payment system for each provider type, and
3. Evaluate the effectiveness of financial incentives for providers to increase hydroxyurea prescribing and decrease emergency department visits for children with SCD.

The initiative will be led by the New York City Health + Hospitals/Queens who will partner with the New York State Department of Health to test the hypothesis that physician incentives can drive the needed system change to increase hydroxyurea use in their patient population.

The Office of Minority Health expects the awarded project to generate data and assess the impact of incentive payments on hydroxyurea prescribing behavior, and support the identification of best practices and lessons learned.

The project period for the grant is September 30, 2020 to September 29, 2023.

Grantee	City	State	Award
New York City Health + Hospitals/Queens	Jamaica	NY	$1,250,000

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Sickle Cell Disease Clinical Data Collection Platform

Grant period: 2020-2022

The Sickle Cell Disease Clinical Data Collection Platform initiative will support a demonstration project to determine whether a standardized clinical data collection platform, shared across medical centers and other healthcare facilities, can serve as a central repository for analyzing data from large patient cohorts, recruiting patients for clinical trials, assess adherence to evidence-based clinical guidelines, and identifying new areas for research. The project will develop and implement a sickle cell disease (SCD) clinical data collection platform, and create and manage a collaborative learning community of participating clinical care teams and patient/family members to pilot utilization of the shared data collection platform.

This Office of Minority Health funded initiative will be led by the American Society of Hematology (ASH), with the ASH Research Collaborative (RC) and the Learning Networks Program at the James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. This initiative will leverage and enhance the ASH RC SCD Data Hub Program to serve as a nationwide SCD data collection platform, and create a new SCD Learning Community. The platform will leverage longitudinal patient data to help track practice patterns, document and share best practices for improving care, facilitate research, and ultimately work to improve outcomes at a national level.

The project period for the grant is September 30, 2020 to September 29, 2022.

Grantee	City	State	Award
American Society of Hematology	Washington	DC	$999,563