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USAID AWARDS HEALTH CARE IMPROVEMENT CONTRACT TO URC
 The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has awarded URC a five-year contract, with a ceiling of $150 million, for the new Health Care Improvement (HCI) Project. HCI will build on URC’s technical leadership of USAID’s global efforts to improve health care quality since 1990 through the Quality Assurance Project (QAP) I, II, and III.
The new project, which is effective September 24, 2007, will support the USAID Global Health Bureau and country missions to address significant challenges in raising the quality of health care in developing and middle income countries. The contract’s task order mechanism will allow USAID country missions and other U.S. Government agencies to issue separate task orders within the HCI mandate. The first task order, effective September 28, 2007, will cover three years and the transition of field and centrally funded work from QAP.
Priority areas for the HCI Project will be scaling up evidence-based interventions and improving outcomes in child health, maternal and newborn care, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and reproductive health. Other significant goals include expanding coverage with essential services; making services better meet the needs of underserved populations, especially women; improving efficiency and reducing the costs of poor quality; and improving health worker capacity, motivation, and retention.
URC’s subcontractors on the HCI Project—the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs for knowledge management; Initiatives, Inc. for human resources management; Management Systems International for scale-up and institutionalization; ENCOMPASS for program evaluation; and Family Health International for clinical HIV/AIDS—enhance the project’s technical assets and bring added value to USAID and host countries.
In addition, URC expects to collaborate with other partner organizations, such as BroadReach Healthcare, the Harvard School of Public Health, The Improvement Foundation, The Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Joint Commission International, MAXIMUS, The National Committee of Quality Assurance, the New York State AIDS Institute, and Singapore Health Services Pte. Ltd.
The new USAID HCI Project will take innovation of quality improvement (QI) methods and tools to a new level, harnessing resources to produce measurable results, especially in Africa, the region of greatest need. The project will be guided by the vision that health care quality can be significantly improved by applying proven QI approaches to curative, preventive, and chronic care.
Central to the HCI strategy will be expansion of the Improvement Collaborative approach, a method which has been at the core of QAP’s successful outcomes. Under QAP III, 29 collaboratives were implemented in 15 USAID-assisted countries: Benin, Bolivia, Ecuador, Eritrea, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Malawi, Nicaragua, Niger, Russia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Vietnam. The HCI Project will continue work in most of these countries with emphasis placed on spread and institutionalization of best practices.
"This award represents a significant increase in funding opportunity for URC,” said URC President Barbara Turner. “The new contract offers URC the opportunity to considerably expand the health impact of quality assurance and continuous quality improvement to people around the world.”
For more information on the Health Care Improvement Project award, please contact Lani Marquez at lmarquez@urc-chs.com.
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