President Biden’s new health agency with a sweeping mandate to cure some of the system’s biggest problems has one big message: Please apply.
The Biden administration finally established the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health in March with an initial $1 billion allotment from Congress after multiple budget delays. The funds, meant to last for three years, are a far cry from the administration’s initial ask of $6.5 billion — which it’s requesting again in its 2023 budget. But it’s a start that ARPA-H’s new director Renee Wegrzyn is keen to prove she can spend well.
Her top priority: “Hire program managers. Loud and clear, way above everything else,” she told STAT in an interview this week. “Program managers come with the ideas, the big problems in health that they want to solve. We can’t pursue those research projects without them.”
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