Fund Seeks to Aid the Chronically Ill

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation says it will spend $25-million in a five-year effort to improve the quality of health care that chronically ill patients receive from hospitals and other health-care systems.

The National Program for Improving Chronic Illness Care will help up to 120 health-care systems design and test a variety of programs for treating patients with illnesses such as asthma, diabetes, and heart disease.

The project will establish the Center for Improving Chronic Illness Care, which will serve as a clearinghouse for information about effective approaches to treating chronic illness. And it will establish a grants program for researchers studying health systems’ care for the chronically ill.

The program will be based at the Center for Health Studies within Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, in Seattle.

For more information, contact Ed Wagner at the Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound’s Sandy MacColl Institute, 1730 Minor Avenue, Suite 1290, Seattle 98101; (206) 287-2877.

Information is also available on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s World-Wide Web site at http://www.rwjf.org.