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 $10 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.

2022 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 Funding

The COPIC Medical Foundation (CMF) works to improve health care outcomes through grand 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 of 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

Fragmentation Across Care Settings
For 2022, our grant funding will continue to focus on the issue of 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 CMF, 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.

Request for Proposals

The COPIC Medical Foundation grant cycle is closed. We will post information about the 2023 RFP process in early November 2022..

2021 Initiatives

Grants

Grants awarded by the COPIC Medical Foundation in 2021 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 2021 cohort of grantees include five organizations of varied size and scope that impact health care in communities across the country. The COPIC Medical Foundation awarded a total of $775,000 in grants.

Here are the 2021 recipients along with a description of the project for which they were seeking funds:

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.