CMS Awards Health Equity Funding to Three New Grantees
October 3, 2022 – The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Office of Minority Health (CMS OMH) is excited to announce this year’s grantees for the Minority Research Grant Program (MRGP). For more than two decades, the MRGP has supported researchers at minority-serving institutions through funding to explore and address health care disparities affecting racial and ethnic minority groups, people with disabilities, members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) community, individuals with limited English proficiency, individuals residing in rural areas, and individuals adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.
CMS OMH is proud to announce three recipients will be awarded grants to expand our commitment to advancing health equity among the populations we serve. Each grantee will receive $333,000 in funding to support their projects, which will examine critical public health disparities and increase health equity research capacities at minority-serving institutions.
The 2022 grantees include:
- The Board of Trustees at the University of Illinois, Addressing Disparities in Access to Transplant: The ESRD Patient Evaluation Clearinghouse (EPEC)
The University of Illinois, an Hispanic-Serving Institution, will engage patients at dialysis centers in Cook County’s low-resourced neighborhoods needing renal transplants. The goals of the project are to inform patients of their individualized characteristics impacting transplant ability and educate them regarding Cook County transplant tendencies, which provide the most utility to them and do so in a manner respectful of their culture and transplant knowledgeability. The intended outcome of the research is the efficient matching of participant characteristics to transplant program functionality in order to lessen the socioeconomic and demographic disparities in access to renal transplantation. Researchers expect significant per patient savings to the Medicare program each year.
- Prairie View A&M University, Investigating the Combined Impact of Spatial Social Networks and Environmental Exposure on Minority Youths’ Mental Health
One of the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Prairie View A&M will use multiple research approaches to understand the individual, community, and environmental factors that impact racial and ethnic minority mental health symptoms. They will investigate the combined impact of social networks and environmental exposure. In addition, the researchers will adopt the life course framework to understand past and present risks and protective factors of mental illness among youths aged 18-29 in the US. The research findings have numerous benefits for bridging the gap in mental health disparity and can identify community-engaged points of intervention.
- University of Hawaii, Improving Medication Use to Achieve Health Equity Among CMS Beneficiaries
The University of Hawaii, an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions, seeks to develop a statewide infrastructure to support medication use health disparities research, with a focus on social vulnerabilities (including funding for Hawaii Health Information Exchange to enhance existing infrastructure). This will also include testing pharmacist-driven, scalable interventions to address the root causes of medication use disparities among vulnerable populations. Finally, they seek to disseminate models that reduce disparities and medication-related acute care among people in CMS programs
To learn more about the Minority Research Grant Program and sign up for updates on funding opportunities, please visit the Minority Research Grant Program website.
