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Small Rural Hospital Improvement Program Grant Program

Purpose

The purpose of the Small Rural Hospital Improvement Grant Program (SHIP) is to help small rural hospitals of less than 50 beds implement quality and operational improvement efforts.

  1. Enable the purchase of equipment and/or training to help hospitals attain value-based purchasing provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA);
    • Activities that support improved data collection to facilitate quality reporting and improvement.
  2. Aid small rural hospitals in joining or becoming accountable care organizations (ACOs), or create shared savings programs per the ACA;
    • Activities that support the development or the basic tenets of ACOs or shared savings programs.
  3. Enable small rural hospitals to purchase health information technology, equipment, and/or training to comply with meaningful use, ICD-10 standards, and payment bundling.
    • Activities that improve hospital financial processes.

Applications

Eligible hospitals are notified each year by their State Office of Rural Health (SORH) when applications are available. SORH collects the individual hospital applications and completes an application for the state. The Federal Office of Rural Health Policy reviews the state applications and notifies each SORH of their award prior to the grant cycle beginning. SORH then notifies individual hospitals of their award, which is divided equally among all eligible North Dakota Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) for the given year.

The regular SHIP funding year runs June 1 – May 31.

Current SHIP funding priority areas are:

  • Consistently reporting MBQIP measures

The priority area(s) must be addressed before working on additional SHIP eligible activities. This information is reflected in each CAH subaward paperwork in the Scope of Work section. A December mid-year check-in occurs each year to see how CAH-selected activities are progressing. The upcoming SHIP hospital application form is sent out to each CAH once released from our Federal funder.

Questions?

Nicole Threadgold, MBA
Program Director
nicole.threadgold@UND.edu