Dr. Clint MacKinney explains the challenges rural hospitals face with current payment systems and the potential that value-based payment holds for meeting rural communities’ needs.
Read MoreLet’s Get a Good Deal on Health Care
Bringing Mental Health Services to Rural Residents
A new library initiative in Texas and an established crisis line in Georgia are bringing mental health services directly to rural residents through teams of lay mental health workers and mental health professionals.
Read MoreThe Codes of Care: How Words and Numbers Have Transformative Power for Rural Healthcare
The greatest opportunity to tell the rural healthcare delivery story is an opportunity often missed — and that opportunity involves translating clinical documentation into medical codes. In addition to describing how the story and quality of clinical care gets translated from words into alphanumeric numbers, medical coding experts also pointed to aligned efforts to familiarize those in graduate medical education settings with the impact of their clinical documentation.
Read MoreParent Partners Provide Mentoring and Support in Rural Iowa
Parent Partners is a statewide program in Iowa that pairs families whose children have been removed from the home with mentors with shared experience who have successfully navigated the state’s Department of Human Services (DHS) system. These mentors coach, advocate, and connect their clients with community resources.
Read MoreEducating Future Healthcare Providers: Health Literacy Opportunities for Webside Manners
Health literacy experts share that as healthcare delivery moves from bedside to webside, new opportunities for health literacy education arise. Emphasizing the need to swap medical jargon for plain language, educators outlined best practices for teaching health literacy principles to healthcare profession trainees.
Read MoreFrom Idea to Reality: Federal Funding Supports Quapaw Nation’s Community Paramedicine Program
By leveraging federal COVID-related funding, the Quapaw Nation now serves its local residents with a new community paramedicine program. Current program data indicates that it’s bringing significant cost savings, along with valuable information for future local healthcare delivery decision-making. Most importantly, the program is also proving to be widely acceptable to community members.
Read MoreA New Era of Health Literacy? Expanded Definitions, Digital Influences, and Rural Inequities
The priority for rural population health is access, including access to health information needed to make personal health decisions. Two of the nation’s health literacy experts join a federal agency official to review current rural challenges of accessing health information that is clear and usable. Along with an exploration of digital health literacy, recently expanded definitions of health literacy are discussed.
Read More“It’s the relationships”: Q&A with Peggy Broussard Wheeler
Peggy Broussard Wheeler, Vice President of Policy at the California Hospital Association, discusses the challenges that the hospitals in her state and nationwide have faced before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. She also shares rural hospitals’ unique strengths and the importance of collaboration and relationships.
Read MoreTop 10 Rural Monitor Articles of 2021
Articles on vaccination, swing beds, COPD, cancer, workforce and more made it onto the year’s most-read list.
Read MoreUnderstanding the “Tool-ish-ness” of Telehealth: Q&A with Dr. Jonathan Neufeld
Clinical psychologist and program director for the Great Plains Telehealth Resource & Assistance Center, Dr. Jonathan Neufeld, clarifies telehealth as an “enabler” of healthcare delivery. Emphasizing that telehealth is only a set of telecommunication tools, he details how the unique use and flexibility of these tools by skilled providers can bring quality care and impact rural health equity.
Read More