Now here’s an opportunity: The Department of Health and Human Services is looking for innovations that can provide quality care while reducing costs, and is launching a $1 billion program to do it. Called the Health Care Innovation Challenge from the CMS Innovation Center and underwritten by the Affordable Care Act, the Challenge “will award grants to applicants who will implement the most compelling new ideas to deliver better health, improved care, and lower costs to people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, particularly those with the highest health care needs.”

With awards ranging from $1 million to $30 million over three years and a goal of identifying new models of workforce development—including the training and education needed to support those new models—CME needs to get in on this one. Deadline to submit a Letter of Intent is December 19, 2011.

Details here.

Not only did my colleague Dave Kovaleski get to go to Hawaii, he got to tour the Sim Tiki Center at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoaʻs John A. Burns School of Medicine while he was covering the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum there recently. I remember getting to see a sim center demo at Duke as part of a CME Leadership conference a few years back, and being awestruck at what the thing could do. I wish more CME providers had access to these robo-patients, because their potential as a learning tool—even for journalists—is IMHO pretty huge.