ViewPoints Blog

The Chartis Center for Rural Health (CCRH) team is proud to partner with the National Organization of State Offices of Rural Health (NOSORH) to celebrate National Rural Health Day on November 17th.  As part of this celebration of rural health, we’ve teamed up with iVantage Health Analytics to recognize top performance in quality, outcomes, patient perspectives and financial stability.

At iVantage, we’re passionate about rural people and places. Over the past five years we’ve conducted objective analysis of rural hospital performance and confirmed that the Rural Health Safety Net functions well and is worthy of the investment Medicare makes to provide “critical access” points of care to the 60+ million Americans that call rural home (including 23 million seniors).

As you may have seen, iVantage was an active sponsor and participant at the Rural Medicine Hackathon, held last weekend in Montana. We think it was a unique opportunity to help rural healthcare providers and our clients advance new solutions. But how?

At this week’s Rural Health Policy Institute in Washington, DC, we presented key findings from our INDEX analysis regarding hospital closures. Forty-seven rural hospitals have closed since the beginning of the decade and in October, we leveraged the Hospital Strength INDEX to evaluate these 47 hospital closures and developed the Vulnerability Index™ with NRHA.

The challenges and uncertainty surrounding rural healthcare are well-documented. And having participated at various events this year – from the Rural Health Policy Institute to the NRHA and NOSORH annual conferences and many regional events – I am excited to see that there’s a real sense of collaboration and commitment to solving these complex issues.

Misconceptions - if voiced long and loudly enough - will over time be interpreted as fact. And facts are what drive decisions, whether in the boardroom or on Capitol Hill. For some time now, rural and Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) have been saddled with the notion that they are less efficient and adhere to lower standards of quality and patient satisfaction than their urban counterparts. But based on the results of our 2014 Rural Relevance Under Healthcare Reform Study released today, this notion can be challenged with empirical data.