Funding Opportunity: Penn Roybal Center on Palliative Care in Dementia Pilot Program. The broad goal of our pilot program is to revolutionize the development and testing of behavioral interventions that leverage behavioral economic insights and data science methods to improve palliative care delivery for persons with dementia in long-term care facilities. Genesis HealthCare, one of the nation’s largest long-term care companies, will act as the learning lab for successfully funded pilots. Given the impact of the pandemic on LTSS facility clinicians and staff, it is possible that proposals that require appreciable hands-on effort on the parts of these essential workers will not be feasible. Thus, investigators are encouraged to propose projects that are as “hands-off” as possible from the perspective of long-term care facility clinicians and staff. If staff or clinician effort is required, investigators should specifically justify in their applications why it may be feasible.

Please note the following about our priorities:

• We welcome applications related to the broad themes of palliative care delivery and advance care planning for persons with dementia in long-term care facilities and their family caregivers.

• We specifically encourage applications that use methods from the fields of behavioral economics, data science, or both, but the most meritorious applications regardless of methodologic discipline(s) will be funded.

We will only fund applications that include a clinical trial as defined by the NIH (which may be a pilot trial designed to test intervention acceptability, preliminary efficacy, or other early-phase outcomes). Proposals for multi-year awards may include research in the first year using other methods that will provide essential data in direct support of a clinical trial (e.g., testing of feasibility, acceptability, methods of identifying patients, etc), if the proposal includes a clinical trial in later years.

We will distribute up to $85,000 in direct costs for pilot funding this year. Individual applicants may request budgets from $25,000 to $85,000 in direct costs per year, and may propose projects lasting 12 to 18 months. Additionally, proposals for Stage IV larger-scale trials may be eligible for co-funding from the NIA IMPACT Collaboratory, in which case larger budgets may be requested.  Applications are due January 31, 2022 at 5 PM EST – the full Request for Applications is attached.