Estimating the Monetary Costs of Dementia in the United States (U01 Clinical Trial Not Allowed) | RFA AG 24 004

Opportunity Information: Apply for RFA AG 24 004

The grant opportunity "Estimating the Monetary Costs of Dementia in the United States (U01 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)" (RFA-AG-24-004) is a National Institutes of Health cooperative agreement designed to produce updated national "cost of illness" estimates for Alzheimer's disease and Alzheimer's disease-related dementias (AD/ADRD) in the United States. The central goal is to calculate the monetary burden of dementia from a broad societal perspective, meaning the work is expected to go beyond simple medical spending totals and account for the full range of direct and indirect costs that dementia creates for individuals, families, health systems, and public programs.

A key feature of this FOA is that it funds a comprehensive, structured process for building credible national estimates using both population-representative data and administrative datasets focused on older Americans. The funded team is expected to secure and analyze appropriate linked data through the National Institute on Aging (NIA) data linkage support contract (MedRIC.info). In practice, this signals that the project is not only about choosing a dataset and running analyses; it is also about navigating data access, linkage, governance, and methodological decisions in a way that produces defensible national numbers.

Because the award mechanism is a U01 cooperative agreement, the project is meant to be collaborative with NIH/NIA involvement rather than fully investigator-directed. Applicants must lay out in detail how they will run the administrative and convening components that guide the work, including the creation and management of two formal groups: (1) a Family and People Living With Dementia engagement panel to ensure that the approach reflects lived experience and real-world caregiving and care needs, and (2) a Technical Monitoring Committee to provide expert oversight and help stress-test assumptions, methods, and interpretation. The FOA makes these governance and engagement activities central, not optional, and expects applicants to describe how these groups will be convened and how their input will shape the cost estimation and analytic decisions.

On the analytic side, the awardee is expected to develop estimates that include both direct and indirect costs. While the FOA does not dictate a single costing framework in the text provided, the intent is clearly to capture broad categories of monetary impact. Direct costs typically include healthcare utilization and spending (for example, hospital care, outpatient visits, prescription drugs, long-term services and supports, skilled nursing, home health, and other paid care). Indirect costs generally refer to economic consequences that do not appear as direct medical payments, such as unpaid caregiving time and related productivity losses or opportunity costs borne by families. The emphasis on a societal perspective implies that the team should aim to capture costs regardless of payer (Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, out-of-pocket, and other sources) and clearly articulate what is included, what is excluded, and why.

The FOA also emphasizes dissemination and transparency as required deliverables. After completing the analyses, the awardee will lead the development of public-facing and scientific products that communicate both methods and findings. Expected outputs include peer-reviewed manuscripts as well as more accessible materials such as data briefs and infographics, along with presentations to the scientific community. In addition, the opportunity explicitly requires that analytic code and project products be shared with the broader research community, signaling a strong expectation for reproducibility and reuse.

Another major component is the administration of pilot projects that run cost simulations to examine how potential treatment and policy changes could alter the cost of AD/ADRD. These pilots are meant to extend the work beyond a static estimate of current burden and into "what-if" analyses that model how changes in care, coverage, interventions, or policy might shift total societal costs. In other words, the project is expected to produce both foundational national cost estimates and an initial capability to simulate how those costs might change under different scenarios.

Eligibility for this funding is broad and includes many organization types across government, academia, nonprofit, and industry, including state, county, and local governments; public and private institutions of higher education; federally recognized tribal governments and other tribal organizations; public housing authorities; nonprofits with and without 501(c)(3) status; for-profit organizations (including small businesses); and additional categories called out in the FOA such as HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions, tribally controlled colleges and universities, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian-serving institutions, AANAPISI institutions, faith-based or community-based organizations, regional organizations, U.S. territories or possessions, and even non-U.S. entities. The activity category is health, the instrument is a cooperative agreement (U01), and clinical trials are not allowed under this announcement.

From the administrative details provided, the FOA was created on 2023-03-14 with an original closing date of 2023-07-03, and it lists an award ceiling of $1,000,000. Overall, the opportunity is structured to fund a team that can combine rigorous data linkage and cost modeling with stakeholder engagement, expert technical oversight, scenario simulation, and clear dissemination, ultimately producing national estimates of the monetary costs of dementia that are methodologically transparent and usable by researchers, policymakers, and the public.

• The National Institutes of Health in the health sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Estimating the Monetary Costs of Dementia in the United States (U01 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 93.866.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2023-03-14.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2023-07-03. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $1,000,000.00 in funding.
• Eligible applicants include: State governments, County governments, City or township governments, Special district governments, Independent school districts, Public and State controlled institutions of higher education, Native American tribal governments (Federally recognized), Public housing authorities/Indian housing authorities, Native American tribal organizations (other than Federally recognized tribal governments), Nonprofits having a 501 (c) (3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education, Nonprofits that do not have a 501 (c) (3) status with the IRS, other than institutions of higher education, Private institutions of higher education, For-profit organizations other than small businesses, Small businesses, Others.

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