Researchers at the Center for Economic Analysis of Rural Health present their findings here.

The map allows users to zoom in and find population data for each county in the country.  State profiles give more detail on demographic changes between 2010 and 2020.  Other infographics and visualizations show information topics such as population change by county, food assistance eligibility, and more detailed breakdown of race and ethnicity.  Population counts from the U.S. Census are used to allocate federal funding, provide data for policymaking, plan economic development, and provide data for research, among countless other needs for quality of life.

A study from the Economic Research Service (ERS) at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) found that, out of 310 counties with high and persistent poverty in 2019, 86 percent were rural.  Nearly half of rural residents who identify as Black or African American and American Indian or Alaska Native lived in these persistent poverty counties; by comparison, 20 percent of poor Hispanics and 12 percent of rural non-Hispanic Whites resided in those counties.

With the assistance of the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy (FORHP) and Stratis Health, the National Rural Health Resource Center’s Technical Assistance and Services Center (TASC) is excited to share their new Small Rural Hospital Blueprint for Performance Excellence and Value.

For nearly a decade, the U.S. health care industry has been undergoing profound change in payment and service delivery; and growing increasingly complex. The past year has layered several additional opportunities and challenges including the need for pandemic and emergency preparedness, massive growth in the acceptance and use of telehealth, spotlighting of social needs as a core component of health, and the systemic and persistent disparities facing people of color. Small rural hospitals face the challenge of being successful in fee-for-service payment systems while preparing for and entering into value-based payment arrangements, at a time of financial stress and uncertainty.

The Blueprint is intended to be a tool to assist rural hospital leaders in implementing a comprehensive systems approach to achieving organizational excellence. It contains an outline of the key inter-linked components of the Baldrige Framework, along with critical success factors relevant to small rural hospitals. Challenges and strategies are also addressed.

The U.S. health system trails far behind health systems in 10 peer countries when it comes to affordability, administrative efficiency, equity and health care outcomes, according to the Commonwealth Fund’s latest international rankings of high-income countries. Unique in measuring and comparing patient and clinician experiences across nations, Mirror, Mirror 2021 shows that in the U.S., an individual’s chance of getting good health care depends to a large extent on income — more so than in any other wealthy country. The U.S., which spends the most per person on health care, has ranked last in every edition of the report since 2004. And the U.S. has fallen even further behind on certain measures, especially health outcomes linked to primary care access and equity in care delivery. Read the report to get the complete health system rankings and discover what the U.S. could learn from other nations to improve health care for all Americans.