About Us

What We Do

The New York State Health Foundation (NYSHealth) is a private, statewide foundation that aims to improve New York’s health care system by expanding health insurance coverage, containing health care costs, increasing access to high-quality services, and addressing public and community health.

Priority Areas

NYSHealth concentrates its initiatives in three strategic priority areas:

Reducing the number of uninsured

NYSHealth has devoted $20 million over a five-year period to reduce the number of uninsured New Yorkers by assessing public policy options with independent, nonpartisan information and analyses of reform options; increasing the efficiency of public coverage programs; stabilizing and expanding private coverage; and developing cost containment mechanisms to free up dollars for coverage.

Improving diabetes prevention and management

NYSHealth has established a five-year, $35 million campaign, “The New York State Diabetes Campaign: Reversing the Epidemic,” to advance the prevention and management of diabetes by improving clinical care, mobilizing communities, and promoting policies that sustain improvements in diabetes care and prevention.

Integrating mental health and substance use services

NYSHealth has committed $10 million over the next five years to improve the integration of care for people with co-occurring mental health and substance use conditions. As part of this initiative, NYSHealth established the first statewide Center of Excellence for Integrated Care, which aims to effect change at clinical delivery sites to achieve integration throughout all phases of the recovery process, and address systemic policy barriers to achieving and sustaining integrated services.

Under this priority area, NYSHealth has committed an additional $2 million over the next two years to its Initiative for Returning Veterans and Their Families to address returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans’ reintegration needs, and to strengthen collaboration between public and private sectors.

Grantmaking

Our grantmaking focus is statewide and we strive for an appropriate geographic distribution of grants. We favor grant initiatives that can have statewide, long-term impact. Since many of the State’s health care problems have common roots with solutions applicable to both upstate and downstate, we also are interested in grants that have potential for replication. In a typical year, the Foundation makes an average of 70 grants totaling approximately $15 million in funding.

NYSHealth awards grants through targeted initiatives related to our three strategic priority areas and through a Special Projects Fund reserved for projects that address important health care or public health issues consistent with NYSHealth’s mission but outside its priority areas.

For both categories of grants, NYSHealth issues requests for proposals and uses external review panels comprising a range of health experts to assess proposed projects.