Center to Advance Palliative Care Launches New Round of the Tipping Point Challenge to Change the Care of Serious Illness

June 26, 2020

New York, NY (June 15, 2020) ─The John A. Hartford Foundation Tipping Point Challenge will catalyze innovation and quality improvement in the care of serious illness. The 10-month national challenge is open to all health care organizations, settings, disciplines, and specialties across the US.

Winning organizations, which will receive an honorarium, national recognition, and exposure, must make positive, breakthrough change in the care of serious illness and must align with one of three areas of high-impact innovation:

  • Building Skills Among Nonpalliative Care Specialties and Disciplines: Improving communication skills and/or pain and symptom management skills among all specialists treating CHF, COPD, and cancer
  • Improving Systematic Access to Specialty Palliative Care
  • Reaching the Patients in Need: Implementing a population health approach to identify and address patients with serious illness and unmet needs

Submissions can reflect initiatives developed and implemented any time within the last three years. They will be rigorously vetted, using an evaluation by an external panel of judges representing expertise matched to the areas of innovation.

Organizations can sign up between June 2020-March 2021. Project submissions will take place during April 2021. CAPC will announce 25 finalists from the high-scoring projects in July 2021 and winning organizations will be announced November 2021.

“Organizations from across the country will get to share their best work and ideas. This is how we begin to make systemic change,” said CAPC Director, Diane Meier, MD. “CAPC started the Tipping Point Challenge last year with a call to build palliative care knowledge and skills among all frontline clinicians, sparking multiple imaginative solutions. The new Challenge is broader in approach, scale, scope, and complexity. The success of the first Tipping Point Challenge led us to create the second – the quest for innovation in training non-palliative care clinicians, systemwide integration of palliative care, and reaching patients and families in need.”

“The John A. Hartford Foundation is improving the care of older adults through support for the Tipping Point Challenge and its recognition and showcasing of the top 25 innovations,” said Terry Fulmer, PhD, RN, FAAN, President of The John A. Hartford Foundation. “We are committed to identifying and communicating about powerful solutions that can accelerate high-impact change.” 

About the Center to Advance Palliative Care

The Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) is a national organization dedicated to increasing the availability of quality health care for people living with a serious illness. As the nation’s leading resource in its field, CAPC provides health care professionals and organizations with the training, tools, and technical assistance necessary to effectively meet this need. CAPC is part of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. For more information, visit https://www.capc.org/, tippingpointchallenge.capc.org and follow @CAPCpalliative.

About The John A. Hartford Foundation

The John A. Hartford Foundation, based in New York City, is a private, nonpartisan, national philanthropy dedicated to improving the care of older adults. The leader in the field of aging and health, the Foundation has three priority areas: creating age-friendly health systems, supporting family caregivers, and improving serious illness and end-of-life care. For more information, visit johnahartford.org and follow @johnahartford.

To arrange an interview, please contact John Zoccola @ [email protected] or 267.664.2759.