So, R. Blake Curd, how much of this federal money should South Dakota send back?
Health and Human Services Secretary Katherine Sebelius just announced $267 million in grants to establish Health Information Technology Regional Extension Centers. These centers will help hospitals everywhere adopt I.T. innovations like electronic health records, the technology that helps the Veterans Health Administration deliver "the highest-quality medical care in America."
Bringing home $5,687,168 of that bacon: Dakota State University.
This grant brought to you by university academics and all those darned leftists who voted for President Obama's stimulus package last year.
From the articles, it's not clear to me what these centers will actually accomplish. It sounds like IT support for software that is going to be purchased from standard vendors.
ReplyDeleteAlso, are the faculty at DSU qualified? This sounds to me like a specialist's specialist work. I dug around on the faculty list at DSU and I'm not seeing a whole lot of funded projects. I would love to see the proposal that was submitted for this grant.
Interestingly, I also noticed that it's a working agreement, not a grant. So HHS is playing a little bit of hardball and can still pull the grant for any reason.
I can't speak for the HHS, but when the DOD goes for working agreements instead of grants it means they have been burned by the institution in the past...
Tony, I think I got to look at the guidelines when DSU was working on the application for this money. I think "working agreement" was the condition set for all applicants from the start.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I dug around a bit more and found that this is part of the recovery act money. Perhaps there is some stipulation with that funding that all grants through it must be working agreements. On grants.gov I found a couple other recovery act items for renewable energy that also stipulate they will be working agreements.
ReplyDeleteI know that there are some unique reporting requirements to touch money from the recovery act. You have to report how many new jobs created/saved/etc. Perhaps that is why it's a working agreement as opposed to a grant.