Rural Health Value

Understanding and Facilitating Rural Health Transformation

Vision: To build and distribute an actionable knowledge base through research, practice, and collaboration that helps create high performance rural health systems.

Dramatic changes are underway in health care delivery and finance. The changing landscape creates new opportunities to design and strengthen local systems of care in rural America. This initiative, funded by the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy, utilizes the extensive analytic and technical assistance capacity of the RUPRI Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis and Stratis Health to understand how evolving health care delivery and financing systems affect rural communities and providers. The project will help rural providers transition to new value-based care and payment approaches that support success in a rapidly changing environment. The project team has considerable experience and success analyzing the rural implications of changes in health services, providing input to shape U.S. rural health care delivery, and helping providers and communities transition to new health care paradigms while maintaining and strengthening essential local services.

Major Changes Affecting Rural Health Care

Four forces are influencing rural health care delivery: changes in payment policies and financing sources, continually evolving quality measures and expectations, evolving models of care to deliver services locally including from distant sources, and regional health care affiliations. The Rural Health Value team has designed three specific aims to help rural providers and policy makers better understand the implications of changes and emerging models and will assist rural providers to participate in national and local demonstrations and pilots. In doing so, we envision that the collective effort will contribute to transforming rural health care to a high performance system.

Rural Health Value Aims

1. Provide direct technical assistance to early adopter rural health care organizations that includes developing value-based care participation strategies and facilitating successful adaptation to new value-based health care payment systems and health care delivery models.
   
   
2. Raise awareness of the unique challenges rural providers and communities confront when implementing value-based care through knowledge dissemination to, and in support of, collective agencies (e.g., states and regional programs) to facilitate broader value-based care model participation.
   
   
3. Engage in bi-directional communication to thoroughly understand unique rural issues and challenges in the evolving volume-to-value transition, and then broadly disseminate key insights, strategies, and lessons learned.
   
   

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