New Yorkers often find the health care system incredibly complex to understand and navigate. Information about prices and quality is opaque. The system is often unresponsive to consumers’ needs and preferences, and patients are not engaged in shared decision-making with their health care providers. Patients are sometimes denied access to their own health care information. Even when people are well, the system is daunting and confusing—in times of sickness, it can be overwhelming. Too often the health care system puts patients last, when they should come first. The New York Health Foundation (NYHealth) wants to change this dynamic and increase health care consumers’ choice, control, and convenience.

To empower New York’s health care consumers, NYHealth issued a Request for Proposals (RFP), Empowering Health Care Consumers in New York State, in March 2016 to help the Foundation identify opportunities in New York State, support new grantees in this work, and encourage creative thinking in this area. Through this RFP, NYHealth is funding ambitious, large-scale projects and studies to increase consumers’ access to their own health information; provide new tools and resources that will inform consumer health care decision-making; and identify strategies that meaningfully engage consumers in determining the types of health care services available in their local communities.

Below is a complete list of NYHealth’s selected organizations and their projects.