Elevance Health Foundation puts $4 million behind community patient safety work
The Elevance Health Foundation has opened a new prize program aimed at one of healthcare’s most stubborn problems: preventable harm that happens outside the hospital and often outside the clinician’s line of sight. Four organizations are sharing $4 million in awards in the inaugural round, with projects centered on fall prevention, medication safety and health literacy.
The prize sits inside the foundation’s Community Action Leadership effort, and its design is deliberate. Instead of funding isolated projects with limited reach, the program is seeking solutions that can scale through community partnerships and move safety closer to everyday life, where medication mistakes, household hazards and confusion about care plans often begin.
One sentence captures the clinical stakes: a single fall can trigger a cascade of emergency visits, rehabilitation needs and loss of independence.
Why the first awards focus on falls, medications and health literacy
Shantanu Agrawal, M.D., Elevance Health’s chief health officer, described the foundation as bringing a distinct perspective to patient safety because it works across many parts of the healthcare system. That broad view matters in a field where failures are rarely caused by one bad decision alone. Medication errors can emerge at the pharmacy counter, during transitions between settings or when patients do not fully understand what they are taking. Falls can happen in the home, then quickly progress into fractures, deconditioning and a much more complicated care trajectory. Health literacy, meanwhile, shapes whether a person can follow instructions, spot warning signs and participate in prevention before a problem becomes an adverse event.
The foundation’s first set of winners reflects that logic. Care Synergy’s CAPABLE program, which stands for Community Aging in Place—Advancing Better Living for Elders, is aimed at helping older adults stay independent and remain in their homes longer, with fall prevention as a central feature. NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation are both working in the medication error space. The Public Health Institute’s Population Health Innovation Lab is focused on health literacy.
These are not abstract quality-improvement themes. They are common pathways to avoidable harm, and each one has a direct bedside consequence when it is ignored.
Community-based solutions are the point, not a side benefit
Elevance is asking each awardee to do more than expand its own footprint. The foundation wants the organizations to build community partnerships and widen their reach as they scale. In practice, that means the prize is not simply a grant mechanism; it is also a convening tool. The foundation is positioning itself as a connector for groups that already have evidence behind their approach but need help translating that work into a broader community safety infrastructure.
Agrawal said the team intentionally looked for programs that were mature enough to have evidence and data behind them, but still early enough that additional investment could accelerate growth. That balance is important in patient safety. Too little validation risks funding ideas that sound appealing but never change outcomes. Too much rigidity can freeze out innovative programs that have already demonstrated promise in real-world settings.
This first round also shows where the company sees underused opportunity. Patient safety is often framed as a hospital quality issue, yet many of the most consequential failures happen far earlier. A patient who misunderstands a medication change may double-dose or stop therapy entirely. An older adult who lives alone may fall in a hallway and never fully regain baseline function. A person with limited health literacy may miss a warning sign that should have prompted earlier care. Those failures are not rare edge cases; they are part of the daily burden of chronic disease management and aging.
Medication errors remain a high-risk, high-frequency problem
Medication management was one of the clearest priorities in the inaugural awards, and for good reason. Errors are common enough to warrant broad prevention work, yet the consequences can be severe when the wrong drug, dose or schedule reaches a vulnerable patient. Transitions of care are especially dangerous because information can get fragmented between prescribers, pharmacies, caregivers and patients themselves. In that setting, reconciliation is not administrative cleanup. It is a safety intervention.
The emphasis on medication error prevention also fits the foundation’s focus on solutions with measurable practical value. Programs that improve how patients understand and manage medicines can reduce confusion before it reaches the point of harm. That is especially relevant for people with multiple chronic conditions, who often face complex regimens and changing instructions from different clinicians.
Health literacy and fall prevention sit at the center of community safety
The health literacy award recognizes a basic truth about patient safety: people cannot act on instructions they do not understand. Clear communication affects adherence, symptom recognition and the ability to escalate concerns early. It also shapes trust, which influences whether someone feels able to ask questions before a risky decision is made.
Fall prevention is equally grounded in everyday clinical reality. Older adults generally want to preserve independence as long as possible, and home-based supports can help them do that. Programs like CAPABLE address the environment in which injury occurs rather than waiting for the injury itself. By working upstream, these initiatives aim to keep patients out of the spiral that often follows a first fall.
The program’s structure suggests a wider philosophy about safety. Preventable harm does not stay inside one institution, and the most useful interventions may be the ones that move through neighborhoods, homes and community organizations rather than stopping at the hospital door.
A prize program built around scale and community reach
Year one, in Agrawal’s view, showed that many organizations across the for-profit and nonprofit sectors are already doing meaningful work on patient safety, but fewer are actively linking that work to community engagement. That gap is the opportunity the foundation is trying to fill. If safety is discussed only within clinical settings, patients are left out of the conversation until something has already gone wrong.
The foundation’s approach points to a more distributed model of prevention, one in which health systems, community groups and patients share responsibility for reducing avoidable harm. The initial awards do not solve patient safety on their own, but they do identify the kinds of interventions that can change daily practice: clearer medication management, stronger fall-prevention support and better public understanding of health risks.
What remains untested is how far these projects can scale once they are pushed into new communities with different needs, resources and care patterns. The first prize round sets the agenda; the harder work is whether these models can maintain impact as they grow.