Seed Grants

The Cornell Health Policy Center Seed Grants provide funding to foster collaboration among Cornell health policy researchers on the Ithaca and NYC campuses. These awards support innovative and impactful health policy research conducted by CHPC core and affiliate faculty. 

Awarded Grants

Policy Solutions for Medication Management: Translating Evidence from a Statewide Survey into Advocacy for Older Adults with Cognitive Impairment (funding awarded in 2025)

Medication adherence for community-dwelling older adults with multimorbidity and cognitive decline is a serious public health issue and leads to worse health outcomes, reduced quality of life, and increased health care utilization and costs. Policy gaps related to reimbursement and insurance coverage for home care services provided to community-dwelling older adults with cognitive decline is a key barrier to implementing effective medication adherence interventions.   

This project aims to formalize collaborative multidisciplinary work and build partnerships among academic and community partners, translate evidence and care-delivery experience, and develop and implement state and federal policy solutions on medication management. The project includes national dissemination of home healthcare providers (based on a New York statewide survey, HOMEMeds NYS SurveyTM) on the prevalence of, key challenges and potential solutions to medication management. The funding will be used to develop a manuscript on the survey findings, develop policy recommendations necessary to implement medication management interventions, and engage with partners (e.g., HCA-NYS Homecare Assoiation of NYS, Visiting Nurse Services, Cornell federal government relations) to advocate for policy changes.

In March 2026, the team met with the Senate Committee on Aging staff.   

Faculty: Dr. Rana Zadeh and Dr. Michael Richards

Building Technology-Policy Joint Solutions for Mental Healthcare Coordination Between Providers and Consumer AI Chatbots (funding awarded in 2026)

While consumer AI chatbots are now a first point of contact for mental health concerns for millions of Americans, no mechanism coordinates these tools with referral and coordination to professional mental health care. Effective chatbot-and-clinical-care referral and coordination requires coordinated change across technology design, economic incentives and health policy. Funding will be used to conduct a series of workshops where leading experts across related domains (Large Language Model chatbot design, health insurance, health tech investment, health policy, consumer tech policy, and people with lived experience) develop roadmaps toward effective chatbot-and clinical care referral and coordination. The roadmaps will specify and sequence the foundational LLM model changes, chatbot application designs, economic incentive structures and policy interventions. The workshops will be facilitated with a replicable method that can be applied to other problems requiring coordinated cross-domain solutions.  

Faculty: Dr. Qian Yang and Dr. Beth McGinty 

Inovalon Support Awards

The Cornell Health Policy Center provides funding to support access to Inovalon data for non-grant funded faculty and trainee heath policy projects.  

Awarded Projects

State-Level Variations in the Diagnosis and Pharmacologic Management of Anxiety and Depression in Youth

Rising prevalence of mental health disorders among youth and a shortage of mental health specialists have resulted in many young people not receiving treatment, leading to a pediatric mental health crisis. This project aims to utilize the Inovalon database to better understand state-level variations in the diagnosis and pharmacologic management of anxiety and depression in youth to inform future policy work around sustaining mental health care in pediatric settings across the nation. This project offers a critical first step to determine whether state-to-state variation in diagnoses and prescribing patterns exist. 

Study team: Dr. Cori Green, Mangala Rajan, Rachel Wirtshafter

Disentangling Patient and Physician Responses to Drug Injury Advertising

Drug injury campaigns are used by law firms to recruit plaintiffs for lawsuits. These ads reach a broad audience and may unintentionally discourage the use of medically beneficial treatments. This project will connect data on drug injury advertising with the Inovalon claims dataset to investigate how drug injury advertisements influence medical decision-making. Prior work found that increases in drug injury advertising exposure led to significant declines in prescription fills for medications to prevent strokes and blood-clots and corresponding increases in hospitalizations for stroke-related diagnoses. This project will investigate whether the changes in prescription fills were caused by patients discontinuing their medication or physicians modifying their prescribing behavior. Understanding this distinction is important for both clinical practice and public policy and will provide new evidence on how legal messaging in mass media affects treatment decisions.

Study Team: Dr. Sylvia Hristakeva