Rural Workforce Innovation Summit

In December 2025, leaders from eight rural organizations gathered in Hutchinson, Kansas, for a summit on healthcare workforce shortages. Each had developed its own approach to recruitment, training, and retention. Insights from the summit are available as a series of case studies, each documenting how one organization designed and implemented its workforce innovation, what results it saw, and what its leaders learned along the way.

Cahaba Medical Care (Alabama) – A Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) in Alabama's Black Belt built a "grow-your-own" workforce ecosystem around a community-embedded Teaching Health Center, combining rural residency tracks, a nurse practitioner residency, and a competency-based advancement pipeline for medical assistants.

Castañer General Hospital (Puerto Rico) – Facing physician shortages in Puerto Rico's central mountains, this FQHC extended clinical capacity through home-based telehealth, deploying mobile teams of nurses and community health workers to reach patients that clinic-based care could not.

Columbia Memorial Hospital (Oregon) – A Critical Access Hospital in Astoria expanded specialty access and stabilized call coverage through a long-term clinical collaboration with Oregon Health & Science University, growing its provider base while preserving independent local governance. (Also featured in a March 2026 Exploring Rural Health podcast episode)

Hutchinson Regional Healthcare System (Kansas) – Confronting a convergence of workforce, financial, and operational crises, this central Kansas system rebuilt employee benefits and compensation around what its own team members said they needed to stay.

New England Rural Health Association (six-state New England region)– A regional collaborative used network-based partnerships to launch two workforce pipelines: a community health worker training program and a cross-border program training physician assistants in behavioral health and substance use disorder care.

Southwest Health System (Colorado) – After a decade of leadership instability, this independent Critical Access Hospital in Cortez adopted a community asset-based recruitment approach, filling nine physician positions and lifting nurse retention above 90% within 18 months. (Also featured in a February 2026 Exploring Rural Health podcast episode)

STRETCH-OB, University of Illinois College of Medicine Rockford(Illinois) – A family medicine residency built advanced obstetric training directly into residency rather than requiring a separate fellowship, creating a faster pathway into rural counties where obstetric clinicians are scarce. (Also featured in our Rural Health Models & Innovations)
See the March 2024 Rural Maternity Innovation Summit for insights from six additional rural maternity programs.

Titus Regional Medical Center (Texas) – Northeast Texas's last independent rural hospital addressed an emergency department workplace violence crisis by introducing telepsychiatry for behavioral health patients boarding in the ED. (Also featured in an April 2026 Exploring Rural Health podcast episode)