This notice announces the opportunity to apply for funding under the Rural Quality Improvement Technical Assistance (RQITA) Cooperative Agreement. The purpose of this program is to advance efforts to improve health care and quality of care in rural areas by supporting quality measure implementation, data reporting, and the use of data to drive improvements in care. This program directly supports critical access hospitals (CAHs) as Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility (Flex) Program beneficiaries in carrying out activities of the Flex Program, and to meet the goals of the Medicare Beneficiary Quality Improvement Program (MBQIP).The purpose of MBQIP is to improve quality of care provided in CAHs by increasing quality data reporting and drive quality improvement activities based on the data.
Technical assistance (TA) shall be provided to beneficiaries of the Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) Federal Office of Rural Health Policy (FORHP) quality initiatives, such as award recipients, CAHs, small rural health care providers, and other health care facilities/providers in rural areas. Reducing provider burden of participation in quality measurement reporting is a priority of this program.
TA support for quality measurement and improvement should include, but is not limited to the following:
• Expanding capacity to use data for quality improvement;
• Providing TA to improve understanding of health information technology and related quality measurement and improvement efforts (including electronic clinical measures);
• Supporting implementation of quality measures, measure reporting, and identifying rural-relevant measures for MBQIP;
• Identifying and disseminating strategies and evidence-based practices for using data to drive quality improvement efforts, in alignment with federal quality measurement and improvement priorities; and
• Providing TA and developing products or adapting existing products to support rural quality measure reporting and uptake.
