Using RHIhub to Support Community Health and Wellbeing

Featured Speakers

	Kristine Sande, MBA, Program Director, Rural Health Information Hub, University of North Dakota Center for Rural Health
	Maren Niemeier, MLIS, Information Resources Manager, Rural Health Information Hub, University of North Dakota Center for Rural Health

This webinar will feature a walkthrough of the Rural Health Information Hub's website, a national clearinghouse on rural health issues and information. Speakers will highlight the types of resources, data visualizations, and tools available to help support your work to improve rural community health and wellbeing.

From This Webinar

• PowerPoint Handout
• Listen to or download an audio version [MP3]

Transcript

Kristine Sande: Hello and happy National Rural Health Day everyone. I'm Kristine Sande and I'm the program director for the Rural Health Information Hub. And I'd like to welcome you to today's webinar using RHIhub to support community health and well-being. We're so glad that you're able to join us today. I hope you know RHIhub is a national information resource. As we celebrate rural health and the power of rural, we'd like to help you all understand all of the resources that are available through RHIhub and how those might help you help your rural communities. Today's speakers will include me as well as my colleague, Maren Niemeier. Maren is our information resources manager, and she's been working with me on the Rural Health Information Hub program for many years and I hope you're excited to hear what she has to say.

Just a little bit about the Rural Health Information Hub. As I mentioned previously, it is a National Rural Health Information Center and we are funded by the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy. All of the services that RHIhub provides are free to the user, courtesy of the federal government. And RHIhub is based at the Center for Rural Health at the University of North Dakota, the School of Medicine and Health Sciences. We are based in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and we also partner with a couple of other organizations that have expertise in rural health, the NORC Walsh Center for Rural Health Analysis, as well as the Rural Policy Research Institute.

And we'll be talking about all of the resources we have available today, but most of the resources that you'll find are available on our website and Maren will do a web tour for you next. But before she does that, I'd just like to emphasize that while RHIhub's main focuses are on healthcare as well as population health and social determinants of health, we also cover other issues as they relate to healthcare. So things like human services, transportation, schools, economic development, technology, and demographic information. As you use our website, you'll see a lot of different types of information that can help you as you make decisions and as you make your case to policymakers. We just hope that you'll find a lot of utility in the website and other resources that we have available. So with that, I will turn it over to Maren and she can lead you through a web tour. Thanks Maren.

Maren Niemeier: Thanks Kristine. Here is the homepage for the Rural Health Information Hub and we are going to start out just looking at this first page. In the left-hand columns, you'll see a real broad overview of the offerings of the site. So when you come back again to visit, we hope you'll be able to look at those and pick up where we left off after this tour is done. And then in the right-hand column, we're calling out recent publications that we've produced. For example, a recent Rural Monitor article. We have a podcast, the latest episode is there, and then some news about what's going on is pulled out as well. And finally, some information on our resource and referral service.

So that is the homepage. And now going back up to the top, what we're going to do for the tour is we're just going to walk our way through each of these broad categories on the site and talk through the resources there and how those could be used to support community health.

So we'll start out in the online library and this is where we provide access to information from a wide range of online resources. So including information from federal and state government, national associations and organizations, and other reputable sources.

And we will start out here in the funding and opportunity section. Funding is always is an important thing if you're trying to start a program or do an intervention, finding that support. It's a very popular part of the website. As we're looking at this section, I'll also highlight some other things that are features throughout the site just to give you an idea of things that you'll see again and again.

So in terms of the funding that we include, we have open opportunities, we have programs you could apply for at any time. We also do include programs that aren't currently open to accepting applications but might do so again in the future.

Before we delve into the specifics in that section, you'll see over here in the right sidebar, we have a little information about the section we're in. We also have the More Useful Tools and this is throughout the site. You'll find other things that we want to highlight that are related to the page you're on. So we have for example, a Starting Points guide in funding. We have several topic guides and these are things we'll be looking at later in the tour and a few other things called out here. So you'll see that throughout the site.

We'll start out looking at What's New in Funding, what we've added in the last 30 days. We have a funding specialist who goes in and look at grants.gov on a daily basis and many other places that list funding programs and then they share them here. And so updates about these are available in our email newsletter, which Kristine will talk about later, but you can also come here to see what we've newly added.

We’ll look at an example record. The funding specialists will go through and pull out key information and really that targeted why would this be of interest to you as a rural community and share that here. So the deadline date, if there is one, the contact person, a summary of what the purpose of the funding program is, who's eligible, if there are any geographic restrictions that are shared, and then a little information about what kind of funding and application are involved. So that's a typical record. You can look also at funding by type, and this gives you a sense of the range of what we cover. It's not just grants and contracts. Certainly, there are grants in there, but also loan repayment programs, scholarships and technical assistance, and educational opportunities. And you'll see here we call out how many active opportunities and inactive are in each of those categories.

You can also look at funding by sponsor. If you know a specific agency or organization has a funding program, you could come here and find it quickly. Looking at funding by topic, probably a pretty common and useful way to look for funding because you probably have an area you're wanting to do a program in. This would be a good way to find some resources that might support you in that. So say for example, you are interested in behavioral health, there are 127 active opportunities we can click in here. That's kind of a lot of opportunities. There are some ways for you to work with the list that we have on the site and I'll show you how it works here in funding and we'll see it again in some other sections.

One really big aspect of funding is what is the geographic eligibility. So you can click here on this button that says "narrow by geography." If we do that, you might pick your own state or you might want to look at things that are available nationally. I'll just click ”national” here and say, "okay." So now our list has become a little shorter. It's just listing those that are available at a national level. You can also choose to hide that inactive funding. If I do that, you won't really see a change here, but it will make the list a little shorter. You might want to sort it by name instead of date. Another option for moving through this information. Or if you change your mind and you want to see the inactive funding, you can uncheck that. You can uncheck national and go back to the full list. And then we also do list funding by state. So that is a quick way to get all those opportunities for your state.

Going back to the Online Library here, we also pull out news on a daily basis. Our staff looks through and find things that are relevant to rural. We pull out the top stories for the past 60 days. So here we are celebrating National Rural Health Day, a great news story for the day. You can scroll through here and see what these top stories are.

Now, not every story is a top story, so if you want more information on your topic, you can go into “News by Topic” and find additional entries that way and by state as well. We have someone on staff who goes through the Federal Register every day that that comes out and pulls out things that are relevant to rural and then writes a synopsis giving you maybe that first peek at whether or not that's something that you want to read. Those links go right out to the Federal Register. If you find one that looks useful to you, you'll be able to get to it quickly that way.

Going back to the Online Library again, we do also have a Calendar of Events and you can look for example by date if you want to see what's upcoming. Here we are in November. There are still some things going on, probably a lot of National Rural Health Day things on the calendar today. We do include both in-person conferences and also virtual opportunities like webinars and so on. So you can find something either in your area that you want to attend or otherwise. And a lot of times you have a topic area of expertise. So for example, if you were interested in agricultural health and safety, you could go in and you could view those upcoming opportunities related to that topic. You can also look, as I mentioned, at events by state.

And then we have calls for presentations. Now this can be a great way to share if you're working on a project and you've had some interesting findings you want to share with other work communities, what you've done that's worked well. This is a great way to find places that are interested in having papers, poster presentations and so on, shared. And so we do call out calls from presentations in our email newsletter as well. But this is a great way to find out what's available to share those lessons that you're learning. And then there's a way to suggest an event. So if you have an event you think would be appropriate, you don't see it on the calendar, please let us know about that.

Back again to the Online Library, we also share organizations. So for example, we have a list of national rural organizations that have an interest in health. We also pull out federal agencies addressing rural health, the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy of course, but also other agencies. We have Rural Health Research Center, State Office of Rural Health, a number of lists. And for the US Congress we pull out the Rural Health Caucus Co-Chairs for the House and Senate. And then also committees that are doing work that impacts rural health are listed as well.

And the last but not least, section in the Online Library that we're going to look at is Resources. This is a large section of the site where we pull together... Here, I'll show you resources by type to give you an idea of what's in here. Audio, mostly podcast episodes in there. We also have directories. Documents is our biggest section with over 11,000 items. And those are journal articles, white papers, just a wide range of different kinds of reports. We also call out maps, presentation slides, tutorials, websites. So you can see that there's a real range of kinds of items in that resources section.

Similar to what we saw in Funding, we call out new resources that have been added in the past 30 days. So this is a way to keep up to date on what we're seeing. And this is I think pretty much the full list of what we're adding. If you subscribe to that newsletter, you'll look at some of the best items, but we add so much we couldn't fit it all into an email, so here's another way to keep up with those. You can look at resources by state, you can also look at resources by topic, and you can see that these categories get kind of big. So we have 319 items on aging and aging related services.

Here you'll see again a lot of that narrowing, similar to what you saw in Funding, you can change the sort if you want. So this is most recent, but you could also switch to by name. Here, we'll look at a little bit more narrowing for this collection because a lot of times you want something about aging, but maybe something else too, something more specific. So if we decide to narrow by topic, you'll get a list that shows you how many items match depending on the category. So say you were interested in aging and care coordination, we'll click that, now the options are fewer because we've narrowed it down to just that set.

You might also be interested in policy aspects of that. We click policy, we get down to four items. Then I'll scroll down here and say, "okay." We'll see that we have now a much more manageable list, maybe a list that's a little shorter than you meant. Maybe you think, "You know what, I'm really interested in all aspects of policy related to aging." You can click this little x and the care coordination aspect will go away and you'll have more items. Or again, you could see that full list by clicking there again.

We also have some key rural health publications called out and list. If you are looking for places to stay current on things going on in rural health, we have state rural health newsletters, state rural health plans, and most recently a list of the publicly available applications to that state rural health transformation program. And if you are aware of that application being available in your state and you don't see it listed here, please let us know. We want to make it as complete a list as we can. So that is the Online Library.

Now we're going to move over to the Topics and States section. And this is where we really pull together resources around a state or a topic from both the Online Library and some other parts of the site that we haven't yet looked at and just give you that big picture look. So we'll start looking at the Topic Guide section and you'll see here a wide range of topics. This is a great place if you are new to working in a topic area around rural health, maybe you are very familiar with the topic but not the rural aspect, or maybe it's just a new area you haven't worked in, or you know someone else who's new to a subject. We'd welcome you to share these topic guides with others.

For example, I think we are aware that the Critical Access Hospitals topic guide sometimes is shared with new board members so they can get up to speed on what exactly a CAH is. So it's created with that in mind for an easy way to get started as well as the collecting point for the information on our site. So the kind of topic guides we have, as you'll see here, we have some how-to guides. So a couple of these are about funding. We also have one on research, one on finding statistics. Statistics being a really important thing if you're writing a grant application or talking to people in your community where you want to really make the case for the need that you're trying to address.

Those healthcare delivery section, we have different facility types and also some other topics related to healthcare delivery. We call out some current issues like cyber security. We also have information on rural health services, population health. We call out some of those other aspects that impact health like human services and schools. And then we have guides on the healthcare workforce.

And we'll just go in and we'll look at the Education and Training guide as a starting point, give you a sense of what's included in the guide. Each of these topic guides starts with an introduction, an overview of the subject to set it up and make sure that you have that grounding in what we are talking about on this guide.

And then we have a section on frequently asked questions that goes into more detail. These are oftentimes questions that we and that people that we work with on the guides wish that you would ask. So these are places where we're trying to share that insight that you might not otherwise... You don't know what you know. This is a great way to find out. And speaking to that kind of contribution of various people, I will say that if you go to the About This Guide, you can find out both the staff member at RHIhub have that works on the guide, but also the wonderful people who've contributed their insights to the guide are listed in the credit section. We really appreciate that assistance in making sure that we're covering these topics well.

So I mentioned that these guides bring together stuff from the Online Library and you can see some familiar things over here in the sidebar. The resources, these are similar to what we saw in the online library just a moment ago, but they're all around the topic of education and training. You can also look at organizations funding, etc, in that manner. And if I go back to the landing page for that, those links are also right here at the top if you know which one you want to jump to.

Now we're going to go switch over to the State Guides, very similar idea but organized around a state instead of a topic.

And we'll look at the Michigan guide and here you will see... Give it a second to populate some things. So we have in the overview here, we call it the State Office for Rural Health for the state and then we have a map showing the nonmetro population you can hover over and get the county name there. And then we have a map of rural healthcare facilities in the state as well as the numbers for those. And then some selected social determinants of health in the way of charts and tables. And I'll just scroll back up to the top, similar to what we saw in the topic guides here again, you can go in and you can browse through the organizations, events in the state, etc. So that is the State and Topic Guides.

And having seen those visualizations, it's great. Jumping off point to our Rural Data Visualizations section, we'll start looking at the Rural Data Explorer. And this is a county-based interactive tool that can let you really get great visual showing the situation for a given topic. And all the things I'm showing you, especially many of these data visualizations are great things for you to reuse. If you're working on a grad application or you're speaking with maybe a state legislator and you want to share that visual of what this means in your community, you're welcome to use these in your presentations and discussions.

So you can pick a variety of indicators within the data explorer and I'll just kind of scroll this list so you can get an idea of the topics that are covered in here. And you certainly are welcome to go in and explore this yourself as well. And then just to show you some of the features, we will go in and we'll look at population without a high school diploma. You'll see that the years available change there as we pick that indicator. This is American Community Survey, five-year estimates data. So every five-year chunk is available and you could click the years that are highlighted to change what you're seeing, the data and the map.

We'll go back to the most recent. You can also choose to just see nonmetro or see all the counties. And while we're on this national map, you can hover over a state and you'll get the state metro and nonmetro information. You can also scroll down and you'll see for the US as a whole metro and nonmetro for this indicator. And then the metro and nonmetro for each state is below there. If you pick a specific state, then you will hover over and you can get the figure for that county that you're hovering over. And again, if you scroll down, you get the state metro or nonmetro. And then for each county it says whether the county is metro or nonmetro, what their figure is. Then going back up here, you can go back to the US as a whole. So a lot to delve into in the data explorer.

We also have a Chart Gallery showing different kinds of charts and you saw a few of those that were embedded in that Michigan guide. But we'll just go into the Chart Gallery and I'll show you a few more things here. You can look at, for example, if you were interested in children and youth like that, we have bar charts, we have line charts at different topics. We have maps. So depending on the type of information, whether we have trend data or so on, determines the kind of chart it is.

Some of them have this little indicator that state versions are available. And when that's the case, then you can go delve in more deeply to a specific state. So we'll just look at this one as an example, uninsured 18 and under. And if you hover over at any point, you can get the figure for nonmetro, or metro, or if you're really looking for that comprehensive information, you could switch to the table view. It's a little easier to export if you have a way that you want to share it. And then you can pick, because this is one of the ones that said it had a state version available, you can go in and pick say Florida instead and see how the figures work out for Florida for this particular chart.

You can also look at charts by state and by type. And then we have a data visualization help section, so that can be helpful for the whole section in terms of what you're seeing and what it means.

And then finally in this section we also do have some static maps. We have maps on demographics, health status, we have some workforce maps, and then we also have healthcare facility maps. And you may have seen some of these maps before if you've attended presentations where people have used them, you are welcome to use these yourself. For example, this critical access hospital map is available and other facility types. And then below those national maps, we have the same state maps that we saw in the state guides available here as well. So that is a data visualization section.

Next we're going to look at Case Studies and Conversations. This is really where we tell those stories of what's going on in rural communities, share those insights from people who are doing that work. So people like you. If you are inspired and have some things you want to share that you think would be a good fit, do let us know.

Rural Health Models and Innovations is where we feature specific projects being undertaken in specific rural communities. Our writers work with program contacts to share that insight. We'll just look at this most recently added one as an example, a hospital high school internship program. And you'll see here at the top each of these call out the need, the intervention undertaken, and the results. So a quick way for you to see if this is something that might be of interest to you. We have written these up with the hope that other communities can adapt and learn from what's being done in other places. And maybe it's an inspiration to you to try to develop a program in your own community.

So we start out with a description of what's being done, some specifics about the services they offer, results that they're seeing. In this case they have some quotes of participants, which is fun to read. And then further down we have these insights from the program contact, the challenges they experienced in setting up the program. They have replication advice for other organizations, they share that here. And then their contact information for the person who shared this work.

So looking at the models and innovations, you can browse in the ways that we've seen other parts of the site, but also by level of evidence. You may have seen grant applications that ask you to use an evidence-based model. And where do you find those? Well, this is one place you can find some models that have been shown to be effective specifically in rural areas, which can be a difficult thing to find. So you can see... You could browse by evidence level, maybe they had a positive program evaluation, it's promising, or they were in a peer-reviewed publication, effective or possibly evidence-based. And then we do have these criteria and evidence-based page. So if you want a little bit more information to see if what you're finding is going to serve the purposes where you're looking for something with an evidence-based, this can fill in those details for you.

You can, as I mentioned, look at these as well by topic, by state, and by source. And there is a way to share your story. If you have a program underway that you think would be a good match, please let us know about it.

Going back to Case Studies and Conversations, the Rural Monitor comes out, it's a mostly feature stories but also interviews with experts on different important topics. And we do include these in our weekly newsletter, but you could see the back issues here if you haven't been subscribed yet. You could look by your favorite author or wonderful writers. You could look by categories. So if you were looking for those spotlight interviews or you're looking for a feature story or something about a FORHP grant, you can look at them that way. Or of course, by state and by topic.

We also do have a podcast and hopefully it is on whatever platform you prefer to use. If you don't see Exploring Rural Health Podcast on your platform of choice, please let us know because we want to make sure it's easy for people to listen to. You can also, if you choose, listen on our website. These are typically interviews with one or two people, sometimes a few more focused on a particular issue. They might be people who are national experts, they might be people who are working at the grassroots level just sharing their insights about a given topic. So you can list it right here if you want. If you're in a situation where listening isn't going to work for you, we also do include the transcript so you can just read through what the conversation was.

And then going back, we also have webinars such as the webinar we're on right now. The archived version of that will be available.

We have videos. These videos, many of them feature programs that are included either in the Rural Monitor or listed in our models of innovation section. They really give you that chance to hear directly from the people doing the work what they're doing, the impact that it's having on their community. So it's a wonderful way to get inspired about what can be done. Some of them center around specific FORHP grant programs. We also highlight some key issues in rural health, some information about philanthropies, and then highlights from the history of rural health is also available. And these are all on our YouTube channel as well.

Going back to Case Studies and Conversations. We do also... The last thing we'll look at here is a section on rural health philanthropy. So if you are interested in doing more to build relationships with philanthropy, it's a very interesting section. We have some information about a group of philanthropies that are working to support rural health and you can find out more about them here and watch some videos about them. You can see information about their past meetings. We also call out here from our models and innovations of Rural Monitor, some examples that have featured work of these different philanthropies impacting rural areas.

And then finally, we have this guide available to you for working with rural philanthropy. This is an area that you haven't done a lot with yet, but you think, “This might be a place that could really support our community.” This is a great place to get started in terms of thinking about what's involved. That is the case study as a conversation section.

The last section we'll look at is Tools for Success. This is just a real collection of different kinds of tools that can be used to support different aspects of getting a program off the ground. So we'll walk through these.

We'll start out with Am I Rural, a very popular tool on our site. We do have a video, so I'm just going to give you the highlights of how this works, but you may want to get in there and watch the video later if you think it's a good fit for you. Or you can just try it out and see. We'll put in an address here. See if I can type this right and I'll click on “locate” and it'll show you on the map where that location is. You can drag this to a different spot if for example, that wasn't really quite the right address, but there it is. And say this was the location we were interested in, I'll click “run report” and it'll show me a little bit about the location, but then also how it stacks up in terms of common rural definition.

So this is in a nonmetro location, it's not in an urban area. It was designated by FORHP as rural. And then a number of other common rural definitions for this location. And then below that we have some program eligibility and shortage designation information. Scrolling back up to the top, you can choose to print or to save this as a PDF. And then we do also have a help section that can talk you through the more specifics. If you don't want to watch the video, this is another good way to get a sense of what the tool does and how it works.

And then going back to Am I Rural, once you've done a search, your little video goes away, but you can either click the X here or clear all to remove the addresses you've entered and then that video will show up again if you want to go back and watch it.

Back to Tools for Success. Another wonderful rich area to delve into are these Evidence-Based Toolkits for Rural Community Health. So again, evidence-based. Besides the section we looked at in the models, this is another place to go if what you're looking for is a way to use a model or have an example if it's evidence-based if you're looking to start a program.

Really just in general for thinking about starting a rural community program, this is a great place to get started. Our partners at the NORC Walsh Center work with organizations to pull out the lessons learned on the given topic, and so they're very rich with insights.

This first one listed Rural Community Health toolkit is an overview that really could work for any topic. So a great place to get started before you delve into those specific toolkits. You can scroll down here and pick different modules or you can step through page by page and read about how to get started with a program. You might be interested in jumping ahead.

You have the same kind of side navigation we saw elsewhere here. You could jump ahead if you wanted to implement a program and just see what the toolkit covers. You can do that. Going back to the list of evidence-based toolkits, if we look at a specific one like the Chronic Disease Management Toolkit, you'll see that it focuses with a little bit more detail on that particular topic and calls out program models that are useful in rural areas with the rural aspect of it, but also the program clearinghouse where individual programs have shared insights about what they have done, what has worked well for them. So for example, we'll click in here, it has a little summary and then also the models being used in that program. So a really rich collection of information in those toolkits.

Another thing you might want to think about is the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy funded program section. Here we call out specific funding programs and connect that to the examples throughout the site of what's being done with them. So for example, if you were interested in the outreach graph and you thought maybe someday you'll apply for that, you have something you want to do, and you're interested in what others have done using that funding. We have here some videos focused on that. Rural Monitor articles from a number of programs that have been funded by the outreach program. And then I'll link back to the models and innovations in a program context. So really great place to get a little more insight in what those programs are. And I'll link right out to FORHP for more information about it.

We also have starting point guides and I had mentioned this briefly when we were in the funding section, we have a guide for how to get started with funding. So I'm telling you about a lot of different things, but here's one place where if what you're looking for is money to support the program you want to do, we walk through the many things on the site that can help you with that. Finding data for program planning and grant applications, topic guides that guide to working with philanthropy, pulling it all together in one place. We also have starting points on health workforce if you're doing work there. If you are a member of the media, we encourage you to look at this guide or if you know someone in the media who's trying to get started writing about rural health, here is information for them. And then educators working with students to do projects and learn about rural information from our site. We have information to help them as well.

We have an Economic Impact Analysis Tool. This is a little bit more complex. I'm not going to go into detail about it right now. There is a video step-by-step guide for how to use it. But in a nutshell, if you bring grant funding into your community and then you take that money and you start spending, you're hiring staff, maybe you're buying supplies, all of that money has a greater economic impact. And this tool will help you show how that money that you brought in has had an even greater impact in your state on its economy.

Back to Tools for Success, we also have the Rural Community Health Gateway. So another starting point if you are interested in just stepping through what it takes to get a community health program going.

So again, calling out different places you could go to identify an intervention. We talked about the models, the evidence-based tool kits, and there's other tips here for how to get started finding an intervention that might work. Again, how to find funding, evaluate, and think about sustainability and how to share those results.

Going back to Tools for Success, we also have a section on testing new approaches that calls out demonstration projects that are rural specific or rural relevant that are being tried in rural areas with little synopsis. And I think most of these links go out to CMS for more information.

And then we have some information specific to care management reimbursement. And here again, we have a recorded webinar, so that goes into greater depth, but you can go through and for each of these different aspects of potentially getting reimbursed for care management, find out more information about that.

And then another fairly new addition is this FORHP Rural Hospital Technical Assistance Finder. FORHP is very generous in supporting many technical assistance programs and this is a way for you to find a match for you depending on your facility type. So say you were maybe not yet but interested in becoming a rural emergency hospital and looking for help, you can pick that facility type.

And then because some of the TA programs are geographically specific, you need to tell us where you are so we can make a good match. So say you were in Alabama, in Jackson County, we have the information we need now to see that yes, this is a location that is rural, so this TA finder is going to be useful to you. Here, you could think about what kind of assistance you're looking for. So say you're looking for that exploration of the REH, click that and you'll see that there is a TA center specific to that. Maybe you're interested in resource leveraging. And you could click that and you'll see that your state office of rural health is available to help with that.

You might also be interested in a financial consultation. Well, because you're in the Appalachian region, you could tap into this potential technical assistance service. So that is a tool that's available for you to explore depending on the kind of TA that might be helpful to you.

And that concludes the tour of the main features of the site. Thank you again for taking the time. I hope you found something that would be interesting and useful to you.

Kristine Sande: For all of you listening online, hopefully you have a much better sense of all of the resources that are available on the website. It's a lot. There's a lot of information available through the site, so we know that you might want to also stay up to date on new things that are coming out because we have folks on our staff who are going through things every day, kind of scanning the universe for new information and funding opportunities and model programs related to rural health. So if you're looking to stay up to date on things that are being added to our website, we do have some resources available for that.

And at the very top of the screen on the RHIhub website, there's an Updates and Alerts link. So if you click into that, you can see RHIhub This Week is an option. And that is our weekly email newsletter. It goes out every Wednesday morning. It features new products that we have on RHIhub, so original products like Rural Monitor articles, new toolkits, or topic guides, models. But it also has those things that go in our online library from other organizations such as news, funding, and opportunities, resources, events, and that sort of thing. So that's a really easy way to stay up to date every week on new things that are coming out related to rural health.

We also have Custom Alerts that you can sign up for and you can set those for the topics and types of information that you want, what state you want information about. And you can choose to receive those daily or weekly. Those are paused right now, but we hope to have those back very soon. So you can go ahead and sign up now. And as soon as we get those back online, you'll start seeing those in your email inbox. And then if you are a person who uses RSS feeds, we do have quite a few different types of RSS feeds available that you could sign up for and get those notifications as new things come out.

And our Exploring Rural Health Podcast, which features interviews with people working in the rural health space. You can click there and sign up or subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast platform so that you'll see new episodes in your podcast platform as those come out.

And also, if you need information that maybe you don't know where to start or you've looked and you can't find something, we have a team of information specialists who can help you. So you can call or email our staff and they can help you find things like funding and opportunities, statistics, experts, or research.

And sometimes information can be hard to find because sometimes it might be in somebody’s head rather than written down on a website. So our team has a lot of connections and knows a lot of experts who might be a good fit to help you. And these are also the same people who are looking every day for new resources to put on the website. So they are very familiar with sources of rural health information and can really be useful as you are looking for all of that information.

We are also on social media if you want to follow us that way and see new things that are coming out or happening with the Rural Health Information Hub.

So we are on LinkedIn, Facebook, and X. And we also have a variety of videos available on YouTube featuring rural programs and rural health issues. So you could subscribe and follow us on any of those platforms.

And just a little bit about how people use RHIhub. I have a few user comments here that we have gotten over the years. The first one here, I use your weekly news digest, so RHIhub This Week, and I actively share that content with community partners. I'm able to look at ground opportunities, resources, and all sorts that help me be more effective in my role.”

So a theme that we do see is that people use it to find information and help them in their work, but also we find that people share resources that they learned about through RHIhub with other people in their community or in their states or their interest groups. So the content that you can find on the site is curated with that type of sharing and collaboration in mind. For instance, we might share funding opportunities that healthcare providers might not be eligible for. So maybe a community garden program that schools are the eligible applicants for. But we know that in your rural communities, you know the people at the school and you might share those opportunities even if you aren't an eligible applicant.

And then the second quote here is, “I started a CHW program in my area with the information in the toolkit I researched on the website.” So this person started a community health worker program. And so that’s an example of somebody using the information to make a positive change in their community. And these next two are quotes from our users that show how RHIhub can save users time and also help them be aware and stay up to date on information that can help them to improve and maintain both health and healthcare in their communities. So those are two of our biggest goals to help people kind of level the playing field for rural communities and organizations, which we know have fewer resources than their urban counterparts.

And so with that, I thank you for the opportunity to share with you today. This slide includes contact information for RHIhub as a whole, as well as for Maren and myself, so that general RHIhub contact information. If you wanted to use the resource and referral service that I mentioned earlier, that is how you would contact our information specialists to help you with finding information.

It looks like we have a couple of questions. One of the questions is where does the information on the site come from and are there sources listed on the page or as links? We do try very hard to make sure that there are links and citations for everything that you're going to find on the site. We think that's very important. In the online library, there are links to the original sources or the original pages for everything in sections like our topic guides. We do a lot of synthesis and bringing information from a lot of different places, but we try to cite that and give you the links to those reports or those government data sources or whatever it might be that we are citing. So yes, you should be able to find links on the pages for most things. Maren, anything else you wanted to say on that?

Maren Niemeier: Well, in terms of where the information comes from, so many places. We have wonderful staff and they're watching hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of websites every day looking for information that's relevant to rural areas. So there are many sites that only occasionally put out a report. It'd be interesting to you. And we're watching all the stuff they put out to find that report and make it available to you.

Kristine Sande: Right. Then there was another question about how do you get to the full list of topics, the person not seeing the menu that was on your screen, Maren, on the left-hand side. And I'm not exactly sure where in the presentation you were when that question came in, but one thing about our site is it is responsive. So if your window is smaller or you have your text size big or you are zoomed in, you might not see that navigation on the left and right-hand side, but there would be a blue button towards the top of the screen that you could click and give you that menu that would otherwise be seen on the screen.

And that's just because to accommodate for different types of screens, different types of windows. So if you're looking at it on your cell phone, you don't want to see the full website. You want to see everything bigger.

Thanks so much for joining us and have a great day.