By their response to the Colorado Rural Health Center’s “Cultivate Rural Health” campaign, Centura Health has joined with us at the Partner level. Centura has made a substantial investment in support of CRHC’s programs that positively improve the impact of rural health care. Click here to read more about this exciting news.
The Partnership level is for hospital systems, foundations, corporations, and other organizations interested in making a significant investment in rural healthcare.
You can join Centura Health in supporting Colorado’s most trusted resource for rural healthcare! Click here for information on becoming a Member, Sponsor or Partner through CRHC’s “Cultivate Rural Health” campaign.
CRHC Has a Close Encounter with CMS
Three staff members from CRHC had the pleasure of meeting face-to-face last month with Dr. Don Berwick, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator. Dr. Berwick requested the meeting, hosted at the Regional CMS offices in Denver. The discussion centered on rural-specific healthcare issues, including innovative access to care programs, regulatory barriers to providing care, and coordinated quality improvement activities happening in rural facilities.
Dr. Berwick was very impressed and requested more information on several innovative practices and quality improvement efforts going on in Colorado including CRHC’s iCare program, the HIT Meaningful Use initiative, and the Community Paramedic program. Regulatory barriers CRHC shared included: the limitations on the Accountable Care Organization proposed rules for rural facilities; mileage limitations for cost-based ambulance services and the frontier extended stay clinic demonstrations: and physician supervision requirements.
Dr. Berwick is gathering rural information from across the nation to determine what positive changes can be made at CMS to increase access in rural areas. He indicated that the Innovation Center will produce multiple opportunities to show promising practices to increase quality, decrease cost and increase access to care in rural areas. The Innovation Center is currently accepting innovative ideas to address access issues by visiting their website. Once ideas have been culminated, the Innovation Center will submit Requests for Applications (RFAs) for facilities to apply to receive funding as a demonstration site. We highly suggest for those of you who have great projects or ideas to submit those to the Innovation Center, and we will be sure to keep you apprised when RFAs are released.
