New HRSA HIV/AIDS Bureau Funding Opportunities Support Innovative Health Interventions and Data Capacity Building

The Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) HIV/AIDS Bureau has released three new Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) through the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program (RWHAP).  All of these NOFOs are part of the RWHAP’s Part F Special Projects of National Significance (SPNS) Program and support the Ending the HIV Epidemic initiative.

Innovative Interventions to Improve Health Outcomes among People with HIV

Two of these NOFO announcements are for an initiative that will use an implementation science framework to support the scale-up of effective and innovative intervention strategies to improve health outcomes for people with HIV in four areas:

• Improving HIV health outcomes for people with substance use disorder;
• Improving HIV health outcomes for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ+) youth;
• Improving HIV health outcomes for people who are or have been incarcerated; and
• Improving HIV health outcomes by using telehealth services.

The first NOFO (HRSA-21-076), entitled “Using Innovative Intervention Strategies to Improve Health Outcomes among People with HIV - Coordinating Center,” will fund an organization to act as a coordinating center for technical assistance (CCTA). The CCTA will solicit and subaward up to 20 RWHAP-funded recipients/subrecipients to serve as implementation sites. Each site will pilot one intervention strategy in one of the focus areas.  During the pilot, the coordinating center will provide technical assistance and develop highly accessible and engaging replication tools and materials to describe the piloted intervention strategies.

The second NOFO (HRSA-21-068), entitled “Using Innovative Intervention Strategies to Improve Health Outcomes among People with HIV - Evaluation Center,” will fund an organization to act as an evaluation center (EC) to evaluate the piloted interventions. The EC will assess the ability of each subawarded site to successfully implement and integrate the intervention strategy. The EC will also assess associated improvements in client outcomes along the HIV care continuum for clients engaged in the piloted interventions. The EC’s findings will determine dissemination plans for the replication tools and materials created by the CCTA with the goal of disseminating those intervention strategies most likely to reduce disparities and improve outcomes across the RWHAP.

For more information visit the NOFO for the coordinating center and the NOFO for the evaluation center. Applications for both opportunities are due March 8.

Building Capacity to Improve Collecting and Reporting Viral Suppression Data for the Medicaid Health Care Quality Measure

In addition, HRSA’s HIV/AIDS Bureau also released a NOFO (HRSA-21-083) entitled “Building Capacity to Improve Collecting and Reporting Viral Suppression Data to the Medicaid Adult Core Set.”This four-year initiative seeks to develop strategies to build capacity among HIV surveillance and Medicaid programs for reporting high-quality HIV viral suppression data to comply with reporting of the HIV Viral Load Suppression (HVL-AD) measure in the Core Set of Adult Health Care Quality Measures for Medicaid (Medicaid Adult Core Set). This work is a continuation of a collaboration among HRSA, CMS, and CDC to better coordinate data among Medicaid, Medicare, and the RWHAP to improve engagement and retention in care and patient outcomes.  HRSA will award one (1) System Coordination Provider (SCP) to select, fund, and work with up to 10 RWHAP Part B state health departments and their associated HIV surveillance and Medicaid programs. The SCP also will work with RWHAP Part B states and HRSA staff to disseminate and promote the replication of findings and lessons learned from the project. Through the SPNS program, HRSA will provide funding in the form of a cooperative agreement.  Approximately $4,000,000 will be available annually to fund one SCP recipient. The application due date is February 16, 2021. 

All application material is currently available on Grants.gov.