Health Care Innovation Awards

The Health Care Innovation Awards funded up to $1 billion in awards to organizations that implemented the most compelling new ideas to deliver better health, improved care and lower costs to people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), particularly those with the highest health care needs.

The Health Care Innovation Awards Round Two are funding up to $1 billion in awards and evaluation to applicants across the country that test new payment and service delivery models that will deliver better care and lower costs for Medicare, Medicaid, and/or CHIP enrollees. Learn more.

Health Care Innovation Awards Round One: Awarded Projects

The CMS Innovation Center announced the first batch of awardees for the Health Care Innovation Awards on May 8, 2012 and the second (final) batch on June 15, 2012. The awarded organizations implemented projects in communities across the nation that aimed to deliver better health, improved care and lower costs to people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), particularly those with the highest health care needs. Funding for these projects was for three years.

View the Project Profiles Main Page 

Initiative Details

The objectives of the Health Care Innovation Awards Round One were to:

  • Engage a broad set of innovation partners to identify and test new care delivery and payment models that originate in the field and that produce better care, better health, and reduced cost through improvement for identified target populations.
  • Identify new models of workforce development and deployment and related training and education that support new models either directly or through new infrastructure activities.
  • Support innovators who can rapidly deploy care improvement models (within six months of award) through new ventures or expansion of existing efforts to new populations of patients, in conjunction (where possible) with other public and private sector partners.

Awards ranged from approximately $1 million to $30 million for a three-year period. Applications were accepted by providers, payers, local government, public-private partnerships and multi-payer collaboratives. Each grantee project was monitored for measurable improvements in quality of care and savings generated.

This initiative encouraged applicants to include new models of workforce development and deployment that efficiently supported their service delivery model proposal. Enhanced infrastructure to support more cost effective system-wide function was also a critical component of health care system transformation, and applicants were encouraged to include this as an element of their proposals.

The CMS Innovation Center would like to thank all the applicants who submitted proposals for the Health Care Innovation Challenge initiative. We received approximately three thousand applications, representing tens of thousands of clinicians, information technology entrepreneurs, medical suppliers, health centers, hospitals, community-based organizations and individual citizens from every corner of the nation.

Additional Information


Health Care Innovation Awards Round One Reports

Year One Reports

Year Two Reports

Year Three Reports

Year Four Reports

Health Care Innovation Awards Round Two

On May 22, 2014, CMS announced the first batch of prospective recipients for the Health Care Innovation Awards Round Two. For more information, please visit the Health Care Innovation Awards Round Two page.

Where Health Care Innovation is Happening