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The Rural Monitor
Articles by Topic: Critical Access Hospitals

In Rural Communities, Where Child Care Is Often Scarce, Healthcare Organizations Are Finding Creative Ways to Help

December 10, 2025
To meet the demand for affordable child care, rural healthcare organizations in Indiana, North Dakota, and Wisconsin have partnered with childcare providers, schools, businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations. These healthcare facilities sell or lease space at a steep discount, and one formed a cooperative with other businesses to offer child care.

Creating Rural Physician Training Sites: Not Easy, Not Simple, But Happening With Federal Support

November 12, 2025
Building on research showing that physicians trained in rural areas are more likely to stay rural, federal funding is supporting new rural residency program start-ups to help mitigate the prediction of a 60% rural physician shortage. Three healthcare leaders, located in sites from rural coast to rural coast, tell their organization's story of how this support is making a difference not just in healthcare access, but impacting their community in other ways.

Rural Community Health Worker Programs: Proving Value and Finding Sustainability

July 24, 2024
For decades, community health workers (CHWs) provided their services outside usual healthcare reimbursement models. In recent years, with research supporting CHWs as professionals effectively assisting patients with navigating health-related social determinants, federal and private payers are exploring reimbursement mechanisms. Four rural healthcare organizations share both the impact and the continued sustainability challenges — and successes — of their CHW programs.

Perspectives on the Long of COVID: From Doomscrolling to Rural Management Strategies

March 8, 2023
In the wake of acute COVID-19 comes another public health concern: Millions of rural Americans are experiencing Long COVID. With a federal agency representative weighing in on rural research efforts, a Tennessee rural health researcher shares his Long COVID story alongside a New York rural healthcare system who shares their story about the condition's management options.

Let's Get a Good Deal on Health Care

May 18, 2022
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.