The Institute for Healthcare Improvement has announced a $4.8 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to help communities across the country build their capacity to improve the health of residents and spread effective community-driven approaches to building a "culture of health."

Awarded through the foundation's Culture of Health program, the grant will support the institute's two-year SCALE (Spreading Community Adopters Through Learning and Evaluation) initiative, which aims to match up to ten "mentor communities" — those with a track record of achieving better health for their residents — with twenty so-called "pacesetter communities" working to implement healthcare improvements rapidly. The institute has convened a number of partners, including Community Solutions, Communities Joined in Action, and the Collaborative Health Network, to help advance the plans of participating communities.

The grant marks the first community-based phase of the 100 Million Healthier Lives initiative, which aims to help a hundred million people live healthier lives by 2020. To date, more than two hundred patients, community leaders, and implementers across the domains of public health, community health, healthcare policy, academia, and business have joined the initiative.

"Across the United States and around the world, we see bright spots where organizations and communities are collaborating to improve health," said IHI president and CEO Maureen Bisognano. "This grant from RWJF will create resources to help develop capability for improvement within these communities, as well as help spread these local successes between communities — identifying the gaps that have impeded progress in the past, creating a system for cross-community engagement and mentoring, and, most importantly, developing a sustainable, peer-to-peer pathway to bring proven improvement strategies to thousands of communities, with potential impact on millions of lives."