CEO Update: Conference Recap

It’s snowing!  Welcome to the first snow of the year, at my house anyways.  I love the fall, but the snow brings in the start of the holiday season with Halloween next week.  Although it’s great to have snow, I’m really glad it held off until this week, so everyone had safe travels to CRHC’s Annual Rural Health Conference.  It was wonderful to be together in person again.

We kicked off the conference with a critical access hospital workshop, celebrating those organizations that have made great strides in quality improvement activities and discussing our current opportunities and challenges. The CRHC team will be taking this valuable information in and making adjustments to current programs or looking for further opportunities to help fill the gaps in services and resources.

Also on Wednesday, we hosted a credentialing workshop where I hope participants took away some useful tips to improve their processes.  Wednesday also brought best practices and updates about Safety Assurance Factors for Electronic Health Records Resilience (SAFER), now a requirement for 2022 Promoting Interoperability attestation and to avoid a Medicare penalty.  Reach out to CRHC if you are interested in credentialing support or education and if you have any questions about meeting the SAFER requirement.

Then the main event, the CRHC Annual Conference where we are so thankful for your attendance!  Jason McCormick kicked off the conference with a keynote address entitled “At the Point of Change” which focused on being intentional in the architecture of leadership practices and how building a business operating system will help you prepare for the future.  We also had presentations focused on building resiliency to address burnout and stress, policy (including CRHC’s efforts in this year’s session and the 2023 priorities), DEI, hospital stimulus grants, culture, USDA grants and loans, the rural connectivity program, telehealth, HIPAA and compliance, remote patient monitoring successes, emotional intelligence, opportunities to improve access, and hospital reimbursement.  Thank you so much to all of our speakers, exhibitors and sponsors who make this event possible!

We also were pleased to give out our annual Rural Health Champion awards to legislators who displayed leadership on rural health issues throughout the past session. This year, CRHC recognized Senator Bob Rankin, Representative Julie McCluskie, and Senator Joann Ginal. CRHC also recognized Vickie Moore with the Rural Health Excellence Award. Stay tuned for a press release with more details next week!

Please don’t forget to be watching your email to fill out the evaluation for the CRHC Annual Conference, we value your thoughts and opinions and use your feedback in planning future events.