Advancing Health Literacy to Enhance Equitable Community Responses to COVID-19

The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH) and the Office of Minority Health (OMH) announce the availability of funds for Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 under the authority of 42 U.S.C. 300u-6 (Section 1707 of the Public Health Service Act) and the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2021 (P.L. 116-260). OMH is dedicated to improving the health of racial and ethnic minority populations through the development of health policies and programs that will help eliminate health disparities. Through its demonstration grants, OMH supports the identification of effective approaches for improving health outcomes with the ultimate goal of promoting dissemination, adoption and sustainability of these approaches. The Advancing Health Literacy to Enhance Equitable Community Responses to COVID-19 initiative aligns with: (1) HHS Strategic Plan Goal 2: Protect the Health of Americans Where They Live, Learn, Work, and Play; (2) Healthy People 2030 objectives: (a) HC/HIT-01: Increase the proportion of adults whose health care provider checked their understanding; (b) HC/HIT-02: Reduce the proportion of adults who report poor patient and provider communication; (c) HC/HIT-03: Increase the proportion of adults whose health care providers involved them in decisions as much as they wanted; and (d) IID-D02: Increase the proportion of people with vaccination records in an information system; and (3) the OASH priority on health disparities (1, 2). OMH will consider the following additional factors when making recommendations for funding, listed below in no particular order: Applicants serving localities with the highest social vulnerability. This may be determined by being in the top 4th as defined by the CDC's Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) county maps at https://svi.cdc.gov/prepared-county-maps.html, or alternate similar data source if SVI is not available. Applicants with identified Minority Serving Institution partners. Minority Serving Institutions are defined by the U.S. Department of Education as a category of institutions of higher education enrolling populations with significant percentages of undergraduate minority students, or that serve certain populations of minority students under various programs created by Congress. Find the full definition and list of Minority Serving Institutions here: https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/edlite-minorityinst.html. See Appendix G for a list of Minority Serving Institutions, which can also be found here https://www.minorityhealth.hhs.gov/assets/PDF/2020_Minority_Serving_Institutions.pdf. Equitable geographic distribution.