Christiana Care Health Services Inc.

Christiana Care Health Services Inc., doing business as Christiana Hospital, is a tax-exempt nonprofit hospital based in Wilmington, Delaware, that acts primarily as a sub-recipient on federal health research and public health grants (72% of recent awards) and as a prime grant recipient on residency training and clinical care programs. The organization has no federal contract prime awards and does not sit on federal procurement vehicles; its federal footprint is entirely grant-based, concentrated in health professions training, clinical research, and pandemic emergency response.

Christiana Care's customer base reflects a research and health services orientation dominated by the Department of Health and Human Services. The National Institute of General Medical Sciences accounts for 56 awards (covering 33% of the award count), followed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency with 26 awards related to COVID-19 emergency protective measures, the Health Resources and Services Administration with 23 awards, the National Institutes of Health with 9 awards, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development with 8 awards. The top five funding agencies account for 71% of the award count. Sub-award activity outweighs prime grants substantially — Christiana Care acts as a sub-recipient on 123 awards routed through prime grantees including the University of Delaware (which funds clinical translational research through its ACCEL program), the Nemours Foundation (pediatric and neonatal health research), Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and various Delaware state agencies including the Executive Office of the Governor and the Department of Safety and Homeland Security.

Representative prime grant work includes a $306,808 Project Grant from the Department of Health and Human Services Bureau of Health Professionals under the Primary Care Training and Enhancement program (CFDA 93.884) effective July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2031, which funds development and implementation of a street medicine residency training curriculum within the Christiana Care Family Medicine Residency Program, designed to prepare approximately 42 residents annually to deliver primary care to individuals experiencing homelessness. The curriculum incorporates instruction from behavioral health specialists, cultural competency experts, medical-legal aid professionals, and housing alliance representatives, with clinical rotations at the New Castle County HOPE Center, a transitional living facility operated by Christiana Care, and substance use disorder treatment clinics providing medication-assisted therapy for opioid use disorders. Additional prime grants include a Project Grant for "Food Is Medicine: A Pathway to Healthier Pregnancy Outcomes" awarded by the Office of Planning Research and Evaluation in August 2023 (completion August 2025), and an American Rescue Plan economic development grant from the Rural Utilities Service for rural healthcare facility improvements awarded in September 2022 (completion September 2024).

As a sub-recipient, Christiana Care participates in clinical trial coordination and research implementation across multiple prime grantees. Under the University of Pennsylvania, the organization serves as a study site for maternal health research focusing on modeling informatics data to track maternal risk and care quality, with researchers including Dr. Sciscione overseeing patient recruitment, protocol implementation, and safety monitoring. Under Nemours Foundation primes, Christiana Care manages neonatal decision aid development and validation, sickle cell patient recruitment and data collection, and pediatric health outcomes research. The organization also received multiple COVID-19 related sub-awards from Delaware state agencies (Department of Safety and Homeland Security and Executive Office of the Governor) covering force-account labor, personal protective equipment, laboratory services, short-term rental facilities, and uninsured patient care during the pandemic. Additional sub-award work includes participation in the University of Delaware's Delaware INBRE supplement grant focused on breast cancer health behavior and biomarker research, with researchers conducting primary data collection and analysis at Christiana Care's Helen F. Graham Cancer Center & Research Institute.

Recent activity has contracted sharply — 36 awards in 2023, 23 in 2024, 10 in 2025, and 5 in 2026 — driven largely by completion of pandemic emergency response grants. The combined potential value across all 171 awards in the portfolio is reported as $712,000, a metric that reflects the preponderance of sub-awards and pass-through grant funding rather than direct contracting authority. Combined dollars obligated across all awards total $208.7 million, indicating that invoice and spending activity substantially exceeds initial award valuations, consistent with multi-year grant drawdowns. Only three awards face ultimate completion within the next twenty-four months, indicating low recompete exposure in the immediate pipeline.