Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell announced $36.3 million in quality improvement awards to 1,113 centers nationwide.

The money, provided through the Affordable Care Act, recognizes quality improvement achievements made by the centers and provides funding for ongoing quality improvement activities.

The health centers received awards for achievements in chronic disease management, preventive care and the use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to report quality data.

Improved clinical quality “translates to better patient care,” said Secretary Burwell.

Among the cost -control goals of the Affordable Care Act are better clinical care, closer measurement of care quality and clinical outcomes, and earlier intervention in chronic diseases.

Awards totaling $11 million were presented to 361 centers with the best overall clinical outcomes.

Another 57 centers received $2.5 million for exceeding national clinical benchmarks for chronic disease management, preventive care, and prenatal care.

About $18 million was distributed to 1,058 centers that demonstrated at least a 10% improvement in clinical quality measures between 2012 and 2013.

To support the use Electronic Health Record reporting, 332 health centers received $4.9 million in funding to report clinical quality measure data on all their patients. HHS described such electronic recordkeeping as “a key transformational step in driving quality improvement for all center patients.”

Nearly 1,300 federally supported health centers provide to nearly 22 million patients through more than 9,200 service delivery sites in all 50 states, the District Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Pacific Basin.

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