CMS will award up to $100 million to fund as many as 30 pilot programs through its voluntary initiative focused on lifestyle medicine.
Six things to know:
1. The agency plans to award up to 30 three-year cooperative agreements totaling as much as $100 million to organizations focused on “evidence-based, whole-person functional or lifestyle medicine interventions” to launch programs that enhance conventional healthcare, according to a March 13 CMS news release shared with Becker’s.
2. The funding opportunity is part of the Make American Healthy Again: Enhancing Lifestyle and Evaluating Value-based Approaches Through Evidence, or ELEVATE, model, which CMS unveiled in December. The initiative will fund up to 30 chronic disease prevention and health promotion pilot projects aimed at integrating lifestyle and evidence-based functional medicine into original Medicare.
3. Applicants must submit a letter of intent by April 10. Applications for the first cohort are due May 15, and the model is slated to launch in October, according to the release.
4. The MAHA-Elevate model will test interventions such as nutrition, physical activity, sleep, stress management and other lifestyle strategies that are not currently covered by Medicare, with the goal of slowing or preventing chronic disease.
5. Participating organizations are expected to receive about $3 million over three years to collect cost, quality and health outcome data, Becker’s previously reported.
6. CMS said the model will generate evidence to determine how lifestyle and functional medicine interventions can be incorporated into care for older populations and could help inform future Medicare coverage determinations.
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