Kaiser scores $54M+ in NIH/ARRA grants

Kaiser Permanente has received 22 grants worth more than $54 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). The insurer said that much of the grant money will go toward research that will leverage its EHRs.

The largest grant is a $24.85 million Grand Opportunities grant to conduct genotyping on 100,000 Kaiser members who are participating in the Research Program on Genes, Environment and Health (RPGEH). According to the payor, the genetic information will be llinked to data on participants from RPGEH health surveys, disease registries and Kaiser's EHR database. This resource could allow researchers to examine genetic and environmental influences on a variety of conditions.

Other NIH/ARRA grants include:

• $7,217,106 Grand Opportunities grant to develop a surveillance system for cardiovascular disease in the Cardiovascular Research Network.

• $3,362,771 Grand Opportunties grant to create a national research database that will organize and leverage Kaiser's EHRs on nearly 30 million current and past members in eight regions of the country.

• $4,971,981 Grand Opportunities grant to study treatment and outcomes for atrial fibrillation in clinical practice.

• $1,005,372 to extend and integrate the Kaiser EMR to measure rehabilitation outcomes for stroke patients.

• $999,852 to study the management and outcomes of heart failure.

• $343,694 to compare the costs of cancer diagnosis and treatment in managed care versus fee-for-services systems.

• $99,971 to study how to use natural language processing to more accurately extract data from the EMR.