Written by: Laura Blumenthal

With the season of spring renewal underway, we at CCI are dreaming up new projects and programs we hope to launch in the coming months.

First we just announced a major foray into the social determinants of health (SDOH) area with the ROOTS program, where health centers and public hospitals will explore the roles they can play in supporting their patients’ non-clinical needs.

This spring, I am reflecting on how to refresh our “Seed” strategy. Past Seed programs at CCI have come under many names – Reimagined Care, Cultivate Fund, and the Safety Net Innovation Challenge. At its core, a Seed initiative offers seed funding to organizations implementing innovative solutions that have been designed and prototyped in partnership with the stakeholders impacted by the solution.

This past year our Reimagined Care teams worked on a variety of challenges. These included rethinking the care model for people experiencing homelessness, finding a way to set up patients entering temporary intensive outpatient care for success when it’s time to transition back to primary care, and developing a standard protocol and toolkit to support patients who monitor their blood pressure at home. One of the key takeaways from their efforts was how valuable it was for them to work closely with the people who would be most affected by their solutions. Doing so “slowed” the work down, but they believed the ideas and solutions that they put forth were much better for it.

In our own efforts to slow down and intentionally align programs and design initiatives that build on each other, we are taking the next few months to figure out how to make the Seed program better. In a time when resources are becoming more and more precious, how does an organization decide whether a solution is worth their time? What time frame facilitates an implementation pace that can support the solution’s sustainability? What does it take to prepare the people involved for a new way of doing something? How will we build in mechanisms to continuously improve on what we create?

We probably won’t have satisfactory answers to all these questions by the time we launch the program in the fall, but I welcome the risk seekers among our network to reach out and tell me stories about your foibles and triumphs seeding projects that challenged organizational conventions to really stick.

Write me at [email protected].

                          

                           

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