What is the best way to sell umbrellas? We have tons of street vendors in New York who know the secret. Is it to have the best-made, reasonably priced umbrella on the block? That’s a good starting point.
Do you need an attractive sign or an attention-getting catchphrase? Good advertising certainly helps. But if you really want to sell your umbrellas, there is one sure-fire way to have them fly off your cart. You guessed it.
Make it rain.
Of course, I have yet to see an umbrella salesman who is that gifted, but one of our savviest grantees, Dr. Eric Coleman, uses this analogy frequently when explaining how he is successfully and rapidly spreading his evidence-based intervention to keep older adults safe during dangerous transitions between care settings, such as from hospital to home.
When he refers to “making it rain,” he is talking about creating an environment conducive to meeting your goals, an environment that creates demand for your services or ideas.
In the case of his Care Transitions Program, a major federal policy shift that began incentivizing reductions in preventable 30-day hospital readmissions rates was, in essence, the “rain.” It prompted health care systems to seek out evidence-based, feasible interventions, like his, to keep people from bouncing in and out of hospitals.
In a world where evidence takes extraordinarily long to be implemented into practice—if it ever even makes it off the pages of peer-reviewed journals—the story of this readmissions policy shift that has spurred health care systems to dramatic action has provided us with a compelling reason to create our fifth new strategy area at the John A. Hartford Foundation: the Public Policy and Communications portfolio.
This is the last in a series of posts we’ve written for the Health AGEnda blog in recent weeks explaining our new funding areas. If you missed any of the previous posts, you’ll find links to each at the end of my post today.
When Dr. Eric Coleman uses the phrase "making it rain," he's talking about creating an environment conducive to meeting your goals.The new Public Policy and Communications portfolio is an expansion and formalization of our prior limited grantmaking in this arena. It will advance the Hartford Foundation’s non-partisan mission to improve the health of older adults through policy and communications grants that will create an environment conducive for all of our other efforts to put geriatrics expertise to work in health care delivery.
This may mean that we play a role in informing policies and regulations that can incentivize widespread change. It may involve creating “rain” by helping the public understand the need for better elder care so they demand changes from their government, health systems, and providers.
As we have in the past, we will put our grantees at the forefront and do not intend to become a policy think tank or cause marketing firm ourselves. We will support organizations, both those new and familiar to us, that have a track record of success in policy or communications, and as with our other strategies, we’ll focus on widespread impact through national or multi-state activities.
We’ll seek to build on the work of other foundations and advocacy organizations and harness any prevailing winds we think are pushing health care delivery and payment reform forward in a positive way.
The portfolio may include support for work such as: communications activities that educate and inform the public, policy makers, and other influential stakeholder audiences about health and aging policy issues; advocacy by organizations that will influence the design and implementation of federal and state health care policies that impact older adults; projects that will influence regulatory change that improves health care for our aging society; and limited amounts of research that produces data and evidence necessary to inform policy making.
Examples of Public Policy and Communications projects we already have include grants to the National Health Policy Forum to provide unbiased aging and health policy research to Congressional and agency staff and to Community Catalyst to incorporate geriatrics health care experts into state consumer advocacy coalitions to influence the design of forthcoming integrated Medicare-Medicaid plans for dually eligible older adults. We will also continue providing communications training to our network of grantees and the new Change AGEnts so they can effectively influence decision makers and lead transformation in health care practice.
We will seek out additional projects and ideas that can help us create a supportive environment for our other strategies through policy and communications activities. While looking for our best opportunities for success, we will certainly take risks, as in all our portfolios. We know that not all of our efforts will succeed, and we will continually strive to learn from our mistakes.
We also know it will be very hard to measure our impact, but we will develop metrics over time that will help us with our ongoing assessment of this strategy area. We are open to your thoughts and ideas, so if you are a “rainmaker,” contact us and help us improve the health of older adults.
This is the fifth and final installment in a series of Health AGEnda posts on the Hartford Foundation’s new funding strategies. Read the previous posts:
What the Heck Are Hartford’s New Funding Areas? Part Four: Tools and Measures for Quality Care
What the Heck Are Hartford's New Funding Areas? Part Three: Models of Care
What the Heck Are Hartford’s New Funding Areas? Part Two: Education to Practice
What the Heck Are Hartford’s New Funding Areas? Part One: Leadership in Action