Rural Quality Improvement Technical Assistance Cooperative Agreement | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The Rural Quality Improvement Technical Assistance Cooperative Agreement (Funding Opportunity Number HRSA 15-150) is a discretionary federal grant program run by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). It was designed to strengthen the quality of care and improve health outcomes in rural communities by funding a single organization to deliver hands-on technical assistance to participants in HRSA's Federal Office of Rural Health Policy (FORHP) quality initiatives. In practical terms, the award supports a dedicated technical assistance hub that helps rural health organizations move from "we have quality data" to "we can use it to make measurable improvements."

The core purpose of the cooperative agreement is to raise performance and outcomes across rural health settings by improving how rural providers and FORHP-supported grantees manage, interpret, and act on quality measures. The program specifically targets beneficiaries of FORHP quality initiatives, including FORHP grantees, Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs), and other rural providers. The technical assistance is meant to build real operational capability in rural settings where staffing, analytic capacity, and quality improvement infrastructure can be limited, and where even small process changes can have a large impact on patient outcomes.

The scope of assistance described in the announcement centers on the full quality improvement cycle. That includes helping rural participants with data collection and analysis so the underlying information is accurate, complete, and usable. It also includes support for understanding measure specifications, meaning the awardee would help organizations correctly interpret what each measure requires, how it should be calculated, what counts in the numerator and denominator, and what data sources are acceptable. From there, the technical assistance extends to benchmarking and target setting, so rural providers can compare performance to relevant peers or standards and choose realistic, meaningful improvement goals. The award also expects support for developing and implementing efficient, effective improvement strategies, which typically means structured quality improvement methods, workflow redesign, staff engagement approaches, and practical tools that fit rural operations. Finally, the technical assistance includes tracking outcomes of quality improvement efforts, ensuring that changes are monitored over time and tied back to measurable results rather than one-time activities.

This opportunity used a cooperative agreement funding instrument, which generally indicates a more active role for the federal agency compared with a standard grant. While the listing does not spell out the day-to-day federal involvement, cooperative agreements commonly involve substantial HRSA participation in planning, coordination, and oversight, especially when the project is meant to serve as a national or multi-site technical assistance resource for a broader portfolio of rural quality initiatives.

Funding for the program was estimated at $500,000 in total, with one expected award. The listing shows no cost sharing or matching requirement, so applicants were not required to contribute non-federal funds as a condition of the award. The award ceiling and floor are both listed as $0 in the extracted data, which usually means the public summary did not populate those fields even though a total funding estimate is provided, and applicants would need to refer to the full announcement for the exact budget expectations and any recommended project period structure.

Eligibility was broad and included domestic public, private, and nonprofit organizations. The notice explicitly includes tribes and tribal organizations, as well as faith-based and community-based organizations, which signals that HRSA intended to allow a wide range of capable entities to compete as long as they could credibly deliver technical assistance across rural provider audiences. The CFDA number referenced is 93.155 (Rural Health Research Centers), which appears in the source data and may reflect how the opportunity was categorized in the system at the time.

Key administrative details include a posted date of April 24, 2015, and an application deadline of June 22, 2015, with the opportunity archived on August 21, 2015. The agency contact listed for applicant support was Megan Meacham at HRSA (MMeacham@hrsa.gov, 301-443-8349), particularly for applicants who had trouble accessing the full announcement electronically.

Overall, this funding opportunity focused less on delivering direct clinical services and more on building rural quality improvement capacity at scale. The intended result was a stronger, more consistent ability among rural hospitals and providers, especially CAHs and FORHP grantees, to collect the right data, calculate and interpret quality measures correctly, set improvement targets, implement changes that work in rural environments, and demonstrate measurable improvements in care and outcomes over time.

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