Rural issues

Rural hospitals and health systems often face a leadership Catch-22: They need strong leaders to overcome the well-documented challenges facing rural health care — limited resources and dwindling populations, for example — but struggle to recruit strong leaders because of these…
Trustee talking points A growing number of small and rural hospitals, unable to recruit or afford physician hospitalists, are staffing their hospital medicine programs with nurse practitioners. Hospitals that use this approach must comply with state and federal regulations regarding scope of…
Uncertainty is the new normal for rural hospitals. Finding ways to see through that uncertainty and move forward successfully brought trustees and executives to the American Hospital Association’s Rural Health Care Leadership Conference last month. Policy and governance were the themes at…
Trustee talking points The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has rolled out a new Medicare physician payment system. The system will affect payment starting in 2019, with data reporting beginning in 2017.  Leaders of small rural hospitals believe success under Medicare…
Wherever you fit into health care, no doubt you’ve been a little jittery these past several years as regulatory and market forces — from payment to population health, from the aging of the baby boomers to the rise of health care consumerism — transform our…
A rural Oregon hospital, Sky Lakes Medical Center, is jumping into the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Advanced Alternative Payment Models, which are the elite track of Medicare’s new clinician payment system, the Quality Payment Program. Providers in Advanced…
Conference Rural health care leaders to meet in Phoenix next month The American Hospital Association and Health Forum’s 2017 Rural Health Care Leadership Conference from Feb. 5 to 8 in Phoenix will bring together top practitioners and thinkers to share strategies and resources for…
Trustee talking points More and more hospitals are joining larger health systems. Boards that want their hospital to remain independent have a number of strategies they can follow. Among them are maintaining and developing a strong corps of physicians and specialists, paying attention to…
Millions of Americans in both urban and rural communities are unable to access essential health care services. A new report from the American Hospital Association, Task Force on Ensuring Access to Care in Vulnerable Communities, offers nine innovative ways to improve access for vulnerable…
Wherever you fit into health care — whatever kind of hospital or health system, ambulatory clinic, physician office, public health department, post-acute care provider or any other entity in the care continuum — no doubt you’ve been a little jittery these past several years…