The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health and the Office of Minority Health (OMH) announce the availability of funds for a Fiscal Year (FY) 2020 grant award under the authority of Section 1707 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C.

§ 300u-6).

OMH is dedicated to

credit:

improving the health of racial and ethnic minority populations through the development of health policies and programs that will help eliminate health disparities.

Through its demonstration grants, OMH supports the identification of effective approaches for improving health outcomes with the ultimate goal of promoting dissemination and sustainability of these approaches.

This particular grant aligns with the following priorities of the Assistant Secretary for Health:
Sickle Cell Disease; Health Transformation; Health Opportunity; Health Innovation and the following HHS Strategic Goals:
Strategic Goal 1:
Reform, Strengthen, and Modernize the Nation's Healthcare System; Strategic Goal 2:
Protect the Health of Americans Where They Live, Learn, Work, and Play; and Strategic Goal 4:
Foster Sound, Sustained Advances in the Sciences.2 This initiative is intended to ultimately improve the lives of patients with SCD, most of whom are racial/ethnic minorities, by improving clinical care delivery and thus aligns directly with OMH’s mission.

The Sickle Cell Disease Clinical Data Collection Platform initiative is designed 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, assessing adherence to evidence-based clinical guidelines, and identifying new areas for research.

OMH expects the successful applicant to plan, design and develop the data collection platform; develop a plan to align and integrate the platform with clinical care sites; define criteria for participating pilot sites; identify and recruit hub and satellite sites to pilot the shared platform; create and manage a collaborative learning community; evaluate utilization of the data collection platform; and develop dissemination and sustainability plans.

When fully developed, OMH expects that the platform will be made widely available to healthcare providers who treat patients with SCD and researchers.