Health Care Rewards to Achieve Improved Outcomes
The Big Question
What if we moved from a sick care system to one that truly rewards better health?
For many Americans right now, preventative health care is not working. Over the past decade, life expectancy in the U.S. has declined sharply and currently trails well behind that of peer countries. This disparity is especially evident among low-income and rural populations, both of which die much earlier than their higher-income and urban counterparts – in part due to a lack of access to preventative care.
The Current State
Health care organizations in the U.S. today lack strong incentives to offer robust preventative care to their patients. In many instances, health care providers will only address an underlying medical problem after an acute event. This approach leads to lower quality of life and higher treatment costs for providers and patients than offering preventative care before the first signs of illness.
HEalth care Rewards to Achieve Improved OutcomES (HEROES) aims to trial and validate a radically different approach to creating preventative care incentives in the health market. This approach involves offering direct payments to individual “health accelerators” – such as non-profits or care consortiums – that successfully implement preventative care campaigns that improve the rates for specific health harms in an entire geographic population.
Examples of health challenges that HEROES may take on include cardiovascular disease and risks, alcohol-related harms, opioid overdoses, and severe complications during pregnancy or birth. To receive payment from the program, successful health accelerators must reduce the overall number of adverse health events – such as heart attacks or serious post-partum bleeds – that occur within a pre-defined target population.
To accelerate the program’s long-term sustainability, HEROES will invite outside entities – such as employers, philanthropic groups, or insurance providers – to partner with ARPA-H and purchase outcomes in the different regions that they serve. Over time, HEROES hopes that this novel incentive structure will eventually become self-sustaining and capable of “surviving in the wild” even after the program ends.
HEROES calls for letters of interest from potential health accelerators, corporations, investors, health insurers, and philanthropists invested in addressing one of the four health challenges mentioned above. Teams with diverse backgrounds and capabilities will be important for fulfilling the program’s goals, and HEROES encourages applications from interested parties with many different specialties or areas of expertise. To learn more about the program, view the HEREOS slides.
Frequently Asked Questions
ARPA-H anticipates that teaming will be necessary to achieve the goals of HEROES. Prospective performers are encouraged to form teams with varied technical expertise to submit a research proposal. To facilitate this process, we have created a teaming page where prospective performers can share their profiles and learn more about other interested parties. If interested in teaming and need help with reaching potential partners, please email email@example.com with the subject line "HEROES Teaming."
Letter of Interest
Please take a moment to complete the Letter of Interest (LOI) linked below. Submission of a LOI is not required to submit an abstract and/or proposal to the HEROES Program Solicitation. Rather, the information provided will be used to gauge program interest, inform program planning and design, and foster a community of potential entities interested in being a part of the HEROES program. In addition, the submission of your LOI will ensure you stay up to date on key program deadlines, events, and the release of the Outcomes Toolkit.
The deadline to submit an LOI is closed.