On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced two new funding initiatives under the American Rescue Plan, passed by Congress earlier this year, that would bring millions of dollars in funding to hospitals and patients.
The first, larger initiative announced is providing $398 million in funding to 1,540 small rural hospitals for COVID-19 testing and mitigation. The agency stated that they “recognize the important role that small rural hospitals have in closing the equity gap and ensuring that rural Americans can protect themselves and their communities from COVID-19” and believe that the funding will help small rural hospitals serve their communities by expanding their COVID-19 testing capacity and mitigation efforts.”
According to the release, the locations receiving the funding are those with fewer than 50 beds as well as designated Critical Access Hospitals. All but five states received some sort of funding from the initiative and Texas received the most funding, getting $29 million to fund 115 hospitals across the state.
The other initiative aims to assist Medicaid and Medicare patients who suffer from mental health or drug abuse issues. The funding opportunity is for $15 million and is meant to be used specifically for providing community-based mobile crisis intervention services for those that qualify. HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said that “Investing in crisis intervention services ensures Americans experiencing a mental health or substance use disorder crisis get the care and treatment they need,” and that “These grants will help states build these critical services to help communities send a responder who is trained and ready to assist people in crisis.”
Their hope is that these funds are used to support states’ assessments of their current services, strengthen capacity and information systems, ensure that services can be accessed 24 hours a day/365 days a year, and provide behavioral health care training for multi-disciplinary teams. States must first apply for this funding and must do so before August 13th if they are to be considered. The time period for this grant will be from September 30, 2021 to September 29, 2022.
