Arizona State University’s College of Health Solutions has received a $9 million grant to continue its work with Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) to advance health equity and address patients’ whole-person care, ASU said in on ASU News.

The university helped AHCCCS, the state’s Medicaid agency, to improve health outcomes since 2019, according to William Riley, professor of health care delivery in the College of Health Solutions. Riley leads the project along with co-principal investigator George Runger of the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence.

“Six years ago the Arizona Medicaid program, AHCCCS, received a $315 million waiver to integrate primary care and behavioral health,” Riley said about phase one of the project. “We led the project in the last three years to work with over 400 health systems and clinics and over 1,000 physicians to improve population health metrics. It was very well received and highly regarded.”

“Phase two will focus on advancing equity and addressing health-related social needs to better impact health outcomes,” he said.

ASU’s College of Health Solutions is one of the largest academic colleges integrated into the Phoenix Bioscience Core in terms of graduate and undergraduate students. It includes majors in nutrition, population health, biomedical informatics, speech and hearing science and kinesiology and movement.

The grant is part of a larger, $250 million program that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services renewed last fall. The 1115 Waiver authorizes states’ Medicaid programs to make experimental or innovative changes and will run through Sept. 30, 2027.

Read more about the second phase of the project and how ASU’s College of Health Solutions is supporting AHCCCS in Arizona.