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They only see the final proposal: Make sure you submit something to funders

This may seem obvious, but bear with me: Funders only see the final proposal you submit. They don’t see how hard you may have worked, the number of drafts you’ve completed, or how much you may have fought with your colleagues during drafting.

Even if the grant writing and assembly process goes bad, you should still submit the proposal anyway; we’ve said similar things in many posts, like “Deadlines are Everything, and How To Be Amazing.” If you don’t submit a proposal on time, you cannot be funded no matter how great the need or wonderful the project concept. If you do submit, however, funding is always possible, even if you are dispirited by the journey there. We’ve seen many internally dysfunctional organizations get funded because they managed to get something submitted, with our help, cajoling, and, near the deadline itself, outright hectoring. We’ve seen zero organizations, functional or not, get funded if they do not submit.

Many grant writing processes are ugly on the inside: Filled with recriminations, unhappiness, fights, bitterness, and so on. But the final product can, if the participants focus on the prize, turn out well regardless of the weakness of initial wrangling.

As it is in many places, The Lord of the Rings is relevant here. You may remember the hellacious journey of Sam and Frodo into and then through Mordor. Their process is, in modern terms, sub-optimal: they are hungry, thirsty, and exhausted throughout; they are opposed by Orcs, Nazgûl, and other foul creatures; the Ring continually tempts Frodo and calls out to its master; and the will of both Sam and Frodo is nearly crushed. Yet their quest is achieved because they persevere.

The process of destroying the Ring is daunting but the outcome is good, or at least an improvement over having all Middle Earth smothered by the darkness of Sauron, who would make all its people slaves. In grant writing, ugly processes can still sometimes yield funded programs. While we always strive to work with our clients to ensure technically correct submission packages that are internally consistent, this is not always possible due to missing support letters, committed matches, etc. Still, we’ve seen some technically incorrect proposals get funded, either through the magic of our grant writing, the ineptness of the reviewers or other opaque factors. Don’t forget that, even in the darkness that sometimes sets in a week before the deadline.

In many things in life, the people who succeed at whatever they attempt are the ones who are most determined to succeed and most determined to grind out a victory. Perseverance is underrated still.

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It’s possible to get re-programmed funds, if you’re tight with your federal agency program officer

In 2010 Isaac wrote “Be Nice to Your Program Officer: Reprogrammed / Unobligated Federal Funds Mean Christmas May Come Early and Often This Year,” and that post is important for the context of this story. We’ve written several funded grants for the same federal program for the same client over the last few years. The client is a national trade group, and last week our client contact called because he’d just gotten a random call from his program officer offering a large tranche of re-programmed funds. That money doesn’t come with any strings beyond the general restrictions on the initial grant-funded program. It’s also a sure thing, which is a rare, valuable thing in the grant world.*

Organizations that get re-programmed funds still have to submit a proposal (which may be short). However short, the proposal for re-programmed funds must be technically correct and usually has a quick turnaround time (this always happens near the end of the federal fiscal year, which is September 30). As a cautionary note, we’ve seen clients who’ve messed up their wired, re-programmed applications. Overall, though, the amount of effort required is usually far smaller than a conventional, competitive grant program.

When Isaac worked for the City of Inglewood in the 1980s, the FAA (yes, the Federal Aviation Administration) gave Inglewood re-programmed funds almost every year for about eight years. That happened because the City of Los Angeles had to relocate several thousand families to extend one LAX runway on the Pacific Ocean side. You can see the vacant land when you take off from LAX and just before the plane crosses the beach.

At the same time, Inglewood, where Isaac was the Redevelopment Manager, was removing about 800 families from under the flight path to the east of LAX, near The Forum and the site of the new LA Rams stadium, for redevelopment. To keep Inglewood from joining all the other players who were suing LAX over the runway extension, a deal was struck in which LAX convinced the FAA to accept grant applications from Inglewood for wholesale land acquisition with “noise mitigation” being the ruse or quid pro quo.

All of this was on the down low, of course, and Isaac wrote all the FAA proposals, which totaled over $25 million. The FAA liked Inglewood, mostly because it could spend the money quickly while accounting for it, so Isaac got a call every August from the FAA program officer asking if Inglewood wanted additional re-programmed funds. The answer was always… yes. Sometimes, all you have to do is not screw it up.


* And bars after 11 on a Saturday night.

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More on Federally Approved Indirect Cost Rates in Developing Federal Grant Proposal Budgets: De Minimus has Arrived

We’ve written about federally approved indirect cost rates before in developing federal grant proposal budgets; I thought there was nothing more to say of this bit of grant writing arcana, but I was wrong.

In general, indirect costs are an agglomeration of “keeping the lights on” costs that are lumped together is a single line item, below the total direct costs in a Federal SF-424A budget form. Since I began writing proposals during Nixon administration,* it was generally necessary for the nonprofit or public agency applicant’s CFO to prepare a “cost allocation plan,” separating the organization’s operating budget into direct costs (e.g., program service staff, client/participant services costs, etc.) and indirect costs (e.g., administrative staff, facility maintenance, etc.).

To claim an indirect cost rate in a federal grant budget, this cost allocation plan must be submitted to the cognizant federal agency, which is the federal department/agency that provides the greatest amount of grant funding to the organization. For example, the cognizant agency for a job training provider would likely be the Department of Labor (DOL), while for an FQHC it would be HRSA.

There’s a Catch-22, however: the organization had to have a federal grant to have a cognizant federal agency to apply to for approval of a cost allocation plan. Thus, non-federal grantees, or ones who never bothered to get an approved cost allocation plan, were basically out of luck regarding indirect costs. There was a workaround: additional line items for administrative costs could broken out. Still, it’s easier to blob a single, indirect-cost line item than it is to include numerous administrative costs, which complicate the budget and narrative while raising uncomfortable questions.

It seems that, while I wasn’t looking, the Feds, and in particular the DOL, has introduced the concept of de minimus into indirect costs. “De minimus” is a Latin expression often used in legal matters to denote something that is too trivial to consider.

We recently completed a DOL proposal for a large nonprofit in a big midwestern city. The client, who we’ve worked for for years, has had lots of federal grants but never applied for an approved indirect cost rate. Since I knew this, I left out indirect costs in the draft budget, putting in a slew of direct cost line items instead. A closer reading of the RFP, however, revealed this nugget:

If you meet the requirements to use the 10 percent de minimis rate as described in 2 CFR 200.414(f), then include a description of the modified total direct costs base.

Apparently the CFR (Code of Federal Regulations) was changed in 2014, allowing a 10% de minimus indirect rate in lieu of an approved rate. Amazing! This old dog has learned a new trick.

Federally approved indirect costs rates can vary from 15% for a small human services nonprofit up to 80% for a university or hospital (think of all the building upkeep, squadrons of deans and hospital administrators, free lunches, etc.). In my experience, however, most Federal agencies will not approve an indirect cost line item more than about 15% for most human services programs, no matter the approved rate. We’ve worked for a large East Cost substance abuse treatment provider that has a Federally approved indirect of 42%, but they never got more than 15% on their federal grants. So the 10% de minimus rate mirrors reality, which is always a surprise in matters relating to the Feds.


* Yes, I’m a geezer.

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Who are the HRSA peer reviewers? An anecdote from the New Access Points (NAP) Program

Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) know that the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), like some other federal agencies, uses peer reviewers for proposals. That can lead to some entertaining coincidences and collisions. We were recently hired by a client who had previously served on a review panel for the last New Access Points competition. In talking with him, I mentioned that we’d written a funded NAP proposal about a year ago for a client in an unusual location. It turned out that our new client had been on the review panel for that proposal (which, fortunately, was funded).

Peer review can in effect shrink the size of the grant world. Peer reviewers also (usually) know something about the programs and processes being discussed, which isn’t necessarily the case with staff reviewers. In some funding agencies, like the Department of Labor, peer reviewers generally aren’t used; if there aren’t enough reviewers, the DOL may grab staffers from other federal agencies to review proposals. That implies grant writers should explain more about basic ideas, rather than assuming that reviewers actual understand the program they’re reviewing. So for staff-reviewed proposals, it’s a good idea to explain more than might be necessary in peer reviewed proposals, since the staffers may not be up-to-date on, say, prisoner reentry common practices, or the finer parts of the parole system.

Because of the small-world effect in peer-reviewed proposals, it can be particularly important to turn in high-quality proposals, because you never know when your proposal is going to act as an inadvertent resume. If you’re part of the Greater Seattle FQHC and someone from the Greater Nashville FQHC reads and likes your proposal as a reviewer, you may much later get a call from them offering you a job.

Don’t underestimate the power of “avoiding social embarrassment” in the list of motivations underlying human behavior.

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In grant writing, you don’t have to be great; you only have to be better than the other guy

You don’t need to submit the perfect grant application (assuming the “perfect application” even exists); you just need to be better than the other guy.

A story: Years ago we we wrote a string of funded grants for a majority-minority California city. The city was not particularly well run and some of its workers were indicted for corruption. But the feds kept pouring money into the city because, while it was messed up, it was still better run than other majority-minority cities at that time. The city wasn’t going to win any good government awards, but it was less corrupt than the alternatives. So the proposals we wrote got funded because the feds wanted to fund a majority-minority city somewhere west of the Mississippi and there weren’t (and still aren’t) many choices.

This pattern repeats itself. A couple years ago we wrote a funded HRSA Service Area Competition (SAC) proposal for a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) in a medium-sized city.* In and of itself this isn’t interesting, because we write lots of funded HRSA proposals. This FQHC client, however, failed to tell us that, as we wrote the first draft, some of their officers were being indicted on corruption charges. Our FQHC client had competition from another large, local nonprofit, which applied for the same SAC grant.

Given our client’s legal problems, we figured they’d never get their SAC grant renewed. We were wrong.

We later discovered why HRSA funded our client: The other SAC applicant was facing corruption charges too, and it had a big federal grant pulled. Our HRSA client kept getting funded because, it was probably the lesser of two evils, and HRSA had to fund someone. Without a SAC grantee in the city, at least 15,000 Medicaid patients would’ve had nowhere to go for primary care.

What makes this story even more fun is the the second nonprofit was also a former client, albeit for a non-HRSA grant. And, of course, the second client also didn’t tell us about their corruption woes when we were writing their proposal.

One sees this general principle in other areas. Tech workers, for example, are now increasingly fleeing Silicon Valley. San Francisco’s draconian land-control policies mean that expanding housing supply is almost impossible. Restricting supply in the face of rising demand causes prices to rise. Silicon Valley’s situation is uniquely insane on the national stage, as this article describes.

Seattle—while not exactly a paragon of good, fast local governance—is allowing more housing units to be built than San Francisco, and it’s even building underground light rail services that are getting done on-time and under-budget. Light rail construction is going so well that residents want more transit tunneling. There is also no income tax in Washington State, which makes Seattle a much less expensive place to live than the Bay Area. Consequently, tech companies and tech workers are leaving California for Seattle—not because Seattle is perfect, but because it’s better and more functional than its southern neighbor. Even highly paid tech workers are voting with their wallets and feet.

Analogies to dating are so obvious that I won’t belabor them here, although I will say that Briefly noted: Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game is an excellent take on the subject.

Potential clients often ask us whether they should apply for a particular grant. We can never tell them definitively, but we do say that if they don’t apply, they definitely won’t get funded. We’ve seen numerous apparent underdogs get funded because they applied and the presumed favorites didn’t, or because they applied and the presumed favorites messed up their application, or because they applied and the funder was sick of the presumed favorite. To get funded, you don’t necessarily have to be the “best,” whatever that may mean. You only have to be better than the other guy.


* At least one Section 330 SAC grant is available for virtually every geographic area in the United States; those grants are used to fund primary healthcare services for predominantly low-income people. Without them, many large FQHCs would not be able to operate. Funded FQHCs must compete to keep their Section 330 funding about every three years when HRSA issues a new SAC RFP for their area.

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HRSA Randomizes FQHC Program Officers, Likely Trading One Set of Problems for Another Set of Problems

In days of yore, most federal grantees had a dedicated program officer who handled budget issues, contract amendments, reports, and the like; the program officer would often conduct site visits, getting to know the executive director and the nuances of the agency and target area. This system began to atrophy during the Reagan administration with cutbacks to federal travel budgets, and today grantees rarely if ever see their program officer. For example, we’ve written many funded YouthBuild proposals for a South Central LA nonprofit, which hasn’t had a site visit from their HUD program office in 20 years of implementing over ten rounds of YouthBuild funding. Still, most grantees develop a virtual relationship with a specific program officer.

We write many HRSA proposals and were surprised to learn during a scoping call with the CEO of a long-time FQHC client that HRSA has changed this system. Instead of having an assigned program officer, HRSA program officers are now randomized. This means that when an FQHC—which often juggles multiple HRSA grants—has an issue, the problem is randomly assigned to one of a pool of program officers. This is more or less the system used when one waits in line at the DMV or Katz’s Delicatessen. At the DMV, this prevents a clerk from issuing fake drivers licenses for a bribe and the counter man at Katz’s from adding a little extra corned beef to his pal’s sandwich every day at lunchtime.

I assume the same reasoning applies at HRSA: randomizing program officers presumably is aimed at preventing special treatment for favored FQHCs or, I suppose, outright graft. Avoiding special treatment has a cost, though, as it’s likely to wildly increase inefficiency and systemic friction. One sees such problems most clearly in defense contracting, but any large bureaucracy can develop them.

In a randomized oversight management system, the program officer handling a particularly issue will have no agency background or context for the problem. I’m sure that HRSA management thinks thinks will lead to “fair” treatment for all grantees, while minimizing the potential for corruption, but it will also clog the system. HRSA program officers are probably GS 11s and 12s and, like most bureaucrats, they aren’t especially motivated to quickly solve grantee problems. Relationships with the grantees can improve motivation because most of us don’t want to be considered jerks by people we know and have repeated interactions with (why this is true is beyond the scope of this post, but Joseph Henrich’s account in The Secret of Our Success is recommended; it’s also a popular book written by a scholar, not a self-help book). Program officers get paid every two weeks, whether they solve problems or create them, as long as their breath clouds a mirror (to prove they’re still alive) when the paychecks are passed out.

HRSA is changing one set of real or imagined problems for a different set of problems. An unintended consequence of this change is also likely to be more congressional interference.

Why? Let’s say you’re the CEO of the fictional Owatonna Community Health Center and need a rapid decision to amend the agency’s NAP grant budget. In the Ancien Régime, the experienced program officer could probably be sweet-talked into a quick budget revision because of the interpersonal relationship and agency knowledge. In the new system, however, the program officer might put the request under her coffee cup and leave for five days of training, followed by vacation. Why does she care about what some random FQHC in Minnesota or wherever thinks or does?

Without any other recourse, the panicked CEO is likely to call their congressperson’s district office for relief, which will result in a field deputy harassing upper level HRSA management in Washington. This will lead to more friction and bad vibes, as management puts the congressionally-induced hammer to the program officer. The program officers will become even more bureaucratic in response, and they’ll make sure every last rule gets followed. Meticulously following rules is actually a CIA-approved method for organizational sabotage. No, seriously, it is: follow the preceding link.

We’ve written about the challenges of managing grants before. Like grant writing, grants management involves a specific set of skills and experience. Anything that makes managing grants harder is not going to help HRSA or FQHCs in the long run.

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Deadlines can be your friend because they force a decision

Many of us have been in romantic circumstances with a wishy-washy or indecisive person (maybe we’ve even been that person). That can be frustrating because the potential romantic partner always seems on the verge of making a commitment, only to pull back, vacillate, introduce a rival, dither, consult with clueless or inept “friends,” and so on.

In the grant world, applying for foundation and government grants is a largely similar process. But the differences count too. Almost all government grants have a hard decision deadline—you’re in or out at a specific point. You have to be ready to submit proposal by the deadline or you can’t get the grant. Although everyone complains about deadlines at one point or another, they’re useful because they make you do things (or not do them). You can’t have an infinite number of meetings spread over months or years. The deadlines force a decision, and forcing a decision is valuable.

There are other advantages to deadline-based government grants: they’re usually for larger amounts of money and longer project periods than foundation funding—unless the foundation really, really loves you (which you won’t know and can’t find out until you apply).

Foundation grants, however, often have simpler applications and will usually fund a wider array of projects. We’ve seen numerous clients get funded for foundation projects that didn’t quite fit government programs. The one thing that foundation clients have in common, though, is that they decide to apply and complete the application process.

Sometimes we get hired in part because we provide an external structure to ensure that the job gets done, rather than waiting until an eternal tomorrow to finish it. In this respect, and to return to the metaphor in the first paragraph, we’re like a dating coach who provides the support and motivation necessary to get out there and make things happen.

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Data-Based Client Tracking Services and Outcomes is a Real Challenge for Many Nonprofits

Jake recently wrote a post on the huge challenges faced by primary care provider organizations in meeting EMR Meaningful Use regulations. This got me thinking about other data collection challenges facing nonprofits. Apart from computers and the Internet,* one of few aspects of grant writing that has changed since I started writing proposals when dinosaurs walked the earth is an ever-increasing RFP/funder emphasis on data tracking to demonstrate services delivered and improved “outcomes.”

The scare quotes around “outcomes” expresses how we feel about many of them. While we’re adept at creating plausible data collection strategies in proposals, regardless of what our clients are actually doing in the real world, we know that demonstrating service delivery levels and outcomes is a major issue for certain types of human services providers. These include many faith-based organizations (FBOs)** and ethnic-specific providers, some of which have been operating since the days of Hull House. We’ve worked for several nonprofits that have been providing services for well over 100 years.

It’s not unusual for smaller FBOs and organizations serving immigrant/refugee populations to provide services in what seems, from the outside, to be a chaotic manner. But the service delivery practices are actually well-suited to their mission. A range of services might be provided to a particular individual, like help with an immigration problem, but the agency will end up helping the person’s extended family members with all manner of issues. In many ethnic communities, the concept of “family” is malleable. A nominal “uncle” or “cousin” is actually not related but hails from the same village or clan in their country of origin.

Such services are usually provided on the fly and the harried case worker, who is typically a co-religionist or from the same ethnicity, hops from client problem to problem without time or interest in database entry. Like pulling a thread on sweater, helping one person in a 30-member extended family can result in dozens of “cases” that may not be separated and documented. The family often does not want the problem documented because of cultural/religious taboos and (often justified) fear of government officials. Thus, much service delivery is provided on the down-low.

Everyone knows that New York City has dramatically changed from the bad old Death Wish days of the 1970s to a glittering metropolis of 70-story apartment buildings for the one-percenters and a well-scrubbed, tourist-focussed Times Square. What isn’t generally known is that an amazing 37% of NYC’s population is foreign-born. This percentage is increasing. NYC has more foreign-born residents than the entire City of Chicago has residents! Rapidly growing NYY immigrant groups include Orthodox Jews from the former Soviet Union, Dominicans, Asians, Central Americans, and so on. We work for many nonprofits that serve these immigrant populations; this client type usually only serves their brethren. These nonprofits have great difficulty documenting the often extraordinary services they provide—one of the main reasons they hire us is because of our ability to weave their stories into the complicated responses required by RFPs, including service and outcome metrics. Like the proverbial centipede, these nonprofits walk perfectly, as long as no one asks them how they do it.

The data capture challenge is compounded because few prospective social workers enter grad school with the idea of becoming bean counters. Like the best doctors and teachers/professors, social workers start off with the idealistic notion that they will spend most of their time helping people, not doing data entry and accounting for every minute of their day. When not extruding proposals or writing novels, Jake is a college English professor. He can attest that much of his best teaching doesn’t show up in metrics.

Many of us have had a “hero teacher” at one point and a conversation or a book recommendation might have changed your life, but will not be reflected in grades or academic honors. Similarly, a case worker who gets a tacoria to hire the “nephew” of one of her clients as a busboy to keep him out of juvenile hall might set the young man on a positive life path, even though “job placement” is not part of her official duties and will not appear in the agency’s reports.


* Which have also made the world worse, at least in some respects.

** This this does not refer to industrial-sized FBOs like Catholic Charities or the Salvation Army, which operate with bureaucratic precision.

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Meaningful Use Regulations, CMS, HRSA FQHCs and the Stalled Push to Electronic Medical Records (EMRs)

According to Mother Jones, the United States has spent billions on electronic medical records (EMRs)* and we’ve got little to show for it. Digitizing healthcare records was supposed to save time, money, and lives. It hasn’t. That news resonates with us because we’ve written dozens of proposals, mostly for Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) RFPs that either explicitly or implicitly require a discussion of our clients’ use of EMR systems. These clients are usually hospitals, Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) or other primary care providers. From them we’ve heard numerous heard off-the-record stories about the fiascos that ensued for providers that have implemented EMRs. For example, we worked for a hospital in Southern California that interfaced with a much larger, nationally known hospital that attempted to implement a comprehensive EMR system. The large, famous hospital eventually scrapped a $30 million EMR system because the doctors simply refused to use it.

There seems to be no good solution to the EMR problem. EMRs have been touted for at least the last 15 years as a tech-based way of improving patient outcomes, while reducing healthcare costs or at least bending the cost curve downward (as health policy wonks like to say). EMRs got a got big push with huge amounts of EMR funding included in the 2009 “Stimulus Bill.” The advent of the Affordable Care Act (“ACA,” or, colloquially, “ObamaCare”) escalated the EMR drive. Various Federal and state agencies advocated and then effectively mandated EMRs.

But this well-meaning concept has at best moved sideways. HealthIT.gov promulgates the wonderfully bureaucratically named “Meaningful Use” regulations, which use a combination of incentives (e.g., higher Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements) and threats. The carrots are offered and the threats enforced primarily by CMS. Everyone is supposed to get to Stage 1 of Meaningful Use (data capturing and sharing) on a supposedly smooth trajectory to Stage 3 (improved outcomes). Stage 3 turns out to be like the intergalactic instantaneous travel through spacetime. We’ve yet to find an hospital, FQHC or other client that has reached Stage 3. Most are stuck at Stage 1, with a few bravely claiming Stage 2. We’ve never seen a client hit Stage 3, though they may be out there, perhaps in a galaxy far far away.

The problem is that EMRs are trying to map the extraordinary complexities of the real world into software. The complexity can be seen in the new International Classification of Diseases, ICD-10 Codes, published by our old friend CMS. ICD-10 codes are used by medical providers and billers to track patients and payments, based on the code or codes of the patient’s particular situation. When we talk to FQHCs, they invariably say that coding errors are among their major problems. ICD-10 has an astounding 68,000 individual codes, compared to only 14,000 codes in the previous ICD-9. In recent years, humans have invented or discovered an enormous number of new ways to get hurt. No one can remember more than a few hundred of these mysterious codes, which are easy to mistype into an EHR and/or be misunderstood by harried doctors and mid-level practitioners. The complexity of the codes, combined with human diversity and frailty, inherently generates huge numbers of mistakes.

Folks with too much time on their hands have published various funny ICD-10-CM codes. Some choice ones (we are not making these up) include: “V97.33XD: Sucked into jet engine, subsequent encounter;” Y92.146: “Swimming-pool of prison as the place of occurrence of the external cause” (how many prisons have swimming pools?); and my personal favorite, “R46.1: Bizarre personal appearance.” You can tweet your favorite bizarre ICD-10 codes to @healthcaredive.

Ask your doctor about their EMR system and you’ll likely here a lot of invective. I live with a doctor and so have heard the horror stories from her and her colleagues. Isaac’s primary care physician (PCP) hates EMRs but is more or less forced to use eClincalWorks, an EMR system that is also popular with our FQHC clients. Epic is another popular one. Still, however you feel about whether EMRs is efficacious or horrible or brilliant or whatever, pretty much every healthcare-related proposal has to mention EMRs, statistics, and tracking. That could be as minor as a project that works on childhood obesity or as major as a hospital chain implementing some new facet of EMRs.

Anyway, EMRs are a specialized case of a more general problem described in “Why Software Fails: We waste billions of dollars each year on entirely preventable mistakes.” EMRs, like other forms of software, have numerous moving parts and numerous human users. Anyone working in or around EMRs needs to read “Why Software Fails.” At Seliger + Associates, we expect to keep writing about EMRs for FQHCs and similar clients for years if not decades to come. In the real world, doing EHRs right is simply a Hard Problem—so hard that it deserves capital letters. EMRs are almost impossible to do “right” and yet have to be done right. They’re so hard that we don’t have a solution. “Why Software Fails” explains why a solution may not exist, no matter how badly HRSA or CMS wants one. As the Soviet Union discovered, mandates from above, no matter how strong, do not automatically translate into fixing problems from below.

* EMRs are alternatively referred to as Electronic Health Records (EHRs), particularly in HRSA and CMS RFPs. In ones types “EHR” into Word, or any other word processor, and the autocorrect feature will change it to “HER.” This in annoying, but does result in some unintentionally funny typos. When finished with proposal draft involving EHRs, always do a find and replace for “HER”.

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In grant writing, make sure you get to the finish line

Five years ago I wrote a post explaining why applying for grants is not like winning an Olympic Gold Medal. A couple of recent conversations with clients made me re-think this analogy, because these clients seemed to want to give up before we completed the proposal submission package but after most of the work had been done.

The clients had an array of not-mutually-exclusive reasons. They’d been traumatized or paralyzed into inaction by the proposal completion process. They’d experienced difficulty getting support letters. Other members of the management team had lost enthusiasm. Christmas is coming in three months. A sudden opportunity to travel to the Galapagos Islands appeared. And so on. This puts us in the position of a baseball third-base coach waving a runner home, even though Yogi Berra is blocking home, waiting for the bullet outfield throw from Mickey Mantle. In baseball you can’t score if you don’t cross home plate. You can’t win an Olympic Gold Medal in the 100 yard dash unless you break the tape. You also can’t get a grant without submitting the proposal in time to meet the deadline. The closer you get to that deadline, the better off you are completing the proposal so that you can at least have a chance of winning.

In these cases, we do everything we can to get our suddenly reluctant clients to cooperate and meet the deadline, even if the proposal is missing a piece or two or is otherwise less than perfect. While we make every effort to help our clients submit technically correct proposals, we’ve also seen proposals funded that were technically deficient. Grant reviewers sometimes miss the deficiency, either from simple oversight or from the fact that RFPs are often astoundingly complex, contradictory and/or opaque—to reviewers and writers.

We’ve even seen federal grant proposal review comments in which the reviewer clearly confused the proposal we wrote for a proposal submitted by a different applicant in a different part of country. In other words, the proposal we wrote was actually scored entirely incorrectly because someone else’s was mistaken for it. This means the other proposal was also incorrectly scored!

Error is the normal state of human affairs, and decades in the grant business have revealed many errors to us. Keep in mind too that as the deadline looms other would-be applicants are probably feeling as demoralized as you. Force yourself to be disciplined enough to get the proposal in as good shape as you can and hit the grants.gov submit button, even one minute in advance of the deadline. You might be one of a handful of applicants who submits a more or less complete proposal. As we’re written about before, since it’s simply not possible to handicap the chances of any proposal being funded, you might as well submit what you have and hope.

Which brings me back around to Yogi, who left us a few weeks ago to play ball once again, this time on his own Field of Dreams. Yogi was the source of many quotes that apply to the grant preparation process—”It ain’t over till it’s over” and “this is like deja vu all over again” seem apropos.