Third Sector to Support ARPA-H’s Recently Announced Health Care Rewards to Achieve Improved Outcomes (HEROES) Program

Earlier this month, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) announced its Health Care Rewards to Achieve Improved Outcomes (HEROES) program, which will distribute $100 million to community stakeholders adopting “radically different approaches” to preventative health care in the United States. ARPA-H is a federal research funding agency that supports transformative biomedical and health breakthroughs in order to provide health solutions for all.

Third Sector and Social Finance will utilize their deep experience and expertise in outcomes-based contracting and Pay for Success to provide strategic guidance and technical assistance to ARPA-H as it designs and stands up this new initiative.

“ARPA-H’s HEROES investment represents a significant opportunity to identify and support innovations in health care that could revolutionize meaningful and equitable health outcomes for millions of people across the nation,” said Caroline Whistler, CEO and Co-Founder of Third Sector. “We are honored to leverage our outcomes-based funding expertise to help ARPA-H design and implement this dynamic new funding opportunity.”

HEROES will focus on four key categories of health outcomes for investment:

  • alcohol-related emergencies;
  • opioid overdoses;
  • cardiovascular disease, and
  • prenatal and postnatal health complications. 

The program is encouraging cross-sector collaboratives to submit proposals that seek to address outcomes in the above-named categories for specific areas of the nation. The proposals will cover a three-year period. These collaboratives can be made up of corporations, investors, health insurers, health service providers, university systems, government agencies, and philanthropy. ARPA-H will contribute up to $15 million in outcomes funding for each selected proposal -- to be matched with contributions from other local and/or national outcomes buyers. In addition, the collaboratives may need to seek additional commitments from foundations, employers, insurers, other government entities, and in some cases, investors willing to fund the upfront programmatic costs.

Third Sector will be doing a series of webinars for interested collaboratives starting March 26 - April  2024. Reach out to Emma Goodman, elgoodman@thirdsectorcap.org, for more information.