COPIC Medical Foundation

Better reasons than ever to do what we do

Mission:
To improve health care outcomes.

Goal Statement:
Be a catalyst in improving the quality of health care delivery by reducing adverse outcomes and supporting innovation.

The COPIC Medical Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization that is part of the COPIC family of companies. Since it was formed in 1991, the COPIC Medical Foundation has provided more than $11 million to improving patient care and medical outcomes. The idea to create a foundation was championed by Harold “Hal” Williamson, COPIC’s first external non-physician board member. He was passionate about philanthropy and encouraged the COPIC Trust Board of Directors to consider giving back to the Colorado health care community in real and meaningful ways. Sadly, Hal passed away in 2001, but his spirit lives on in what the Foundation has become over the years. Today, its efforts extend across multiple states, and it has impacted the lives of many.

2023 Initiatives

Grants

Grant Recipients

Grants awarded by the COPIC Medical Foundation in 2023 focus on reducing fragmentation across care settings. A top concern in the field of patient safety, breakdowns in care from a fragmented health care system can lead to readmissions, missed diagnoses, medication errors, delayed treatment, duplicative testing and procedures, and reduction in quality of care leading to general patient and provider dissatisfaction. For the COPIC Medical Foundation, contributing to a solution to this safety concern means supporting scalable or replicable solutions, focusing on the testing of new ideas or growing existing solutions, and then seeing avenues for larger application.

COPIC Medical Foundation grant recipients are making a difference in a variety of ways. The 2023 cohort of grantees include four organizations of varied size and scope that impact health care in communities across the country. The COPIC Medical Foundation awarded a total of $511,000 in grants.

Here are the 2023 recipients along with a description of the project for which they were seeking funds:

AIRnyc (New York)—Reducing fragmentation in prenatal and postpartum clinical and social care for high-risk Black and Latinx pregnant persons.

Metropolitan State University of Denver (Colorado)—EMT and nursing interprofessional education pilot and launch focusing on interprofessional education to reduce fragmentation and improve patient outcomes.

Black Doulas for Black Mamas (Texas)—Perinatal community health workers to fill gaps in maternal health, improve birth outcomes and lower morbidity and mortality in rural Texas.

Kansas Health Care Collaborative (Kansas)—Innovative approach to improving care transitions for patients dismissed from a hospital emergency room visit or inpatient stay through use of health information exchange technology and data across the state of Kansas.

Grant Funding

The COPIC Medical Foundation (CMF) works to improve health care outcomes through grant funding of:

• Programs and initiatives that improve patient safety and quality of care through systems changes and improvements;
• Pilot programs that are designed to reduce medical errors; and
• Development and implementation of checklists and other tools to improve disease management and transitions in care.

Criteria
To be considered for funding, organizations must meet the following minimum criteria:

• Approach or program has demonstrated potential for uptake or replication by the health care community
• Organization is designated as a 501(c)(3) organization or has an identified fiduciary

Focus Area
For 2024, our grant funding will continue to focus on the issue of reducing fragmentation across care settings.

Request for Proposals

Deadlines and Applications
The COPIC Medical Foundation grant cycle is closed. We will post information about the RFP process in early November 2023.

Previous Initiatives

Academy of Emerging Leaders in Patient Safety (AELPS)

The COPIC Medical Foundation has a long history of supporting the Academy for Emerging Leaders in Patient Safety, a program that runs for a few weeks each summer in Breckenridge, Colorado, led by internationally-renowned patient safety experts. The COPIC Medical Foundation will continue to support one week of AELPS in 2022 (having been postponed in 2021), fully underwriting participation for 20 medical residents from states across the region. For more information, please visit www.telluridesummercamp.com/aelps-cmf.

Grant Recipients

In 2022, the COPIC Medical Foundation awarded a total of five grants to the following organizations:

Bryan Health Connect (Nebraska)—Expand Bamboo Health clinical event notification system to additional locations across Nebraska.

Children's Hospital Colorado (Colorado)—Rollout and implementation of the ImPACT Navigation Hub in care coordination for complex pediatric patients as they transition to adult care.

Minnesota Medical Association Foundation (Minnesota)—Project ECHO focuses on the challenge of transitioning youth with medical complexity to adult care in Minnesota.

Providence Portland Medical Foundation (Oregon)—Providence and the Oregon Physician Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment (POLST) Registry will partner to build a bi-directional interface which integrates Providence's Epic electronic health record with the Registry.

West Mountain Regional Health Alliance (Colorado)—Community Resource Network West Mountain, a social information exchange platform in western Colorado, will facilitate a care coordination effort to support individuals experiencing homelessness with coordination by hospitals, health and behavioral health providers, community organizations and government agencies.

In 2021, the COPIC Medical Foundation awarded a total of five grants to the following organizations:

Children’s Health Fund, New York and National—A review, update, and dissemination of the successful Referral Management Initiative to incorporate new technologies to enhance care coordination procedures for pediatric populations living in under-resourced communities.

Children’s Hospital Colorado Foundation, Colorado—The ImPACT Navigation Hub: A centralized resource hub to coordinate the transition of young adult patients with pediatric onset conditions to adult care.

Children’s National Medical Center, Washington, D.C.—Improving coordination of pediatric mental care after psychiatric hospitalization.

Kansas Healthcare Collaborative, Kansas—AlignAllHealth: A collaborative tool that combines all health information technology with highly trained clinical and care management staff to support innovative and data-driven care management processes for high risk patients.

Mile High Health Alliance, Colorado—The “Orange Flag” Project: Using historic, predictive and real-time data to inform emergency department personnel of a patient’s high utilization of emergency services to aid in care coordination.