The Rural Health Information Hub’s Exploring Rural Health podcast is featuring a three-part series of the 2026 Innovation Tank finalists selected from FORHP’s Rural Communities Opioid Response Program (RCORP) grantees.
This first episode features first-place winners, Lincoln County Ambulance District Chief Ray Antonacci and Battalion Chief Sarah Czarnecki sharing their RCORP-funded initiative to provide buprenorphine to incarcerated individuals in their county jail.
Rural Hospital Provider Assistance Program – Apply by July 27. The Rural Hospital Provider Assistance Program provides direct financial assistance to eligible rural hospitals facing structural payment disadvantages for the maintenance of health care providers with the goal of maintaining essential health care services and preventing avoidable closures.
Eligibility for this program is based on methodology outlined in a Federal Register Notice. Eligible rural hospitals must have no more than 50 acute care inpatient beds, an established Medicare wage index value below 0.90, and be located in a HRSA-designated rural area. A technical assistance webinar is available to learn more about the program and application process.
Visit the HHS webpages Tips for Preparing Grant Proposals and HRSA Grants Page for important information on pre-application requirements and guidance on submitting a well thought out application.
The Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council (PHC4) released Financial Analysis 2025 Volume One, today, displaying Fiscal Year 2025 (FY25) financial data for Pennsylvania general acute care (GAC) hospitals.
The report offers insight into fiscal measures such as uncompensated care, operating margins, net patient revenue, and total margins. These measures are presented by region and hospital, along with statewide trends over time. Barry D. Buckingham, PHC4’s Executive Director, stated, “By including 3-year average comparisons and statewide averages along with individual hospital metrics, this report offers a comprehensive view of the financial health of Pennsylvania’s general acute care hospitals. These insights give communities across the Commonwealth the tools they need to make informed health care decisions.”
The report shows that in FY25, 26% of Pennsylvania hospitals posted a negative total margin and 11% posted a total margin between 0% and 4%. The remaining 63% of GAC hospitals posted a total margin higher than 4%. Additional details shown in the report include:
PHC4 is an independent council formed under Pennsylvania statute (Act 89 of 1986, as amended by Act 15 of 2020) in order to address rapidly growing health care costs. PHC4 continues to produce comparative information about the most efficient and effective health care to individual consumers and group purchasers of health services. In addition, PHC4 produces information used to identify opportunities to contain costs and improve the quality of care delivered.
For more information, visit phc4.org or review the full report here.
A new KFF brief examines the changing federal approach to state Medicaid program integrity, including the review of state Medicaid Fraud Control Units (MFCUs) and denial of the Hawaii MFCU’s recertification. CMS has also asked all states to revalidate “high-risk” Medicaid providers and has taken financial actions in two states—pausing $350 million in federal Medicaid funds for Minnesota and $1.3 billion in Medicaid funds for California (the largest deferral in agency history). CMS also sent inquiries about program integrity to California, Florida, Maine, and New York.
The Trump administration has made fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicaid and other federal programs a major focus of its health policy agenda. As the administration’s efforts evolve, many open questions remain about the future of Medicaid program integrity, including which states might become a focus of administration effort, whether Congress will change Medicaid program integrity requirements, and what it means for access to care for Medicaid enrollees.
The University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center developed a publicly available data resource that tracks hospital-based obstetric care availability across U.S. counties from 2010–2024.
The project was designed to create and annually update a national database identifying county-level obstetric service availability and obstetric unit closures to support analysis of trends in rural maternity care access over time. As of 2023, 60 percent of rural counties lacked hospital-based obstetric services according to a recent University of Minnesota research brief. The dataset includes county FIPS codes, state identifiers, and annual indicators showing whether each U.S. county had hospital-based obstetric care during each year from 2010 through 2024 and is available for download in XLS format to support research, policy analysis, and program planning related to rural maternal health and healthcare access.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released a proposed rule to reduce the payment rate limit for certain Medicaid State directed payments (SDPs) with inpatient hospital services, outpatient hospital services, nursing facility services, and qualified practitioner services at an academic medical center to 100% of the total published Medicare payment rate for a Medicaid expansion state, or 110% of the total published Medicare payment rate for a non-expansion Medicaid state.
The rule proposes to extend the payment rate limit to all SDPs for all services in all states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories beginning on or after January 1, 2029. They also proposed to establish a limit for targeted Medicaid fee-for–service payments.
Comments are due by July 21.
This resource comes from a peer-to-peer session titled “Roots, Relationships, and Research: Advancing Rural Health Through Community Engagement.”
Development of the resource was led by Community Health Workers and Community-Based Organizations partnering with the NIH Community Engagement Alliance, a research collaboration working to ensure that health research addresses the most critical issues at the community level and benefits the largest number of people.
Experts from the National Technology Center – Telehealth Technology Assessment Resource Center reviewed all 50 state plans for the Rural Health Transformation Program with a close look at technology-enabled care in rural settings.
A recording of that presentation, along with the transcript and slides are provided here by the HRSA-funded National Consortium of Telehealth Resource Centers.
In February 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) published the first significant revision in more than 20 years to 42 CFR part 8, the regulations that guide opioid treatment programs (OTPs).
The changes promote greater retention in care by reducing barriers to receiving evidence-based medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) and promoting practitioner’s professional judgment in meeting the needs of individual patients with patient-centered approaches to care.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced the Audit Enforcement and Risk Oversight (AERO) initiative.
AERO, through the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Financial Resources, aims to utilize analytical artificial intelligence tools to conduct audits across all 50 states and other federal grant recipients. AERO will review all audits that grantees have filed in the last five years. States, local governments, nonprofit organizations, and other grantees that receive $1M or more in federal funding must submit an audit to the federal government to ensure compliance with federal regulations and detail their financial operations.
With the AERO initiative, HHS hopes to eliminate or reduce audit noncompliance, unresolved audit findings, and delinquent submissions. HHS did not provide an estimate of potential cost savings, noting that the initiative is too new.
In its press release, the department stated that any entity that is unwilling to address findings from AERO may face temporary payment withholds, suspension or termination of award, withholds of future federal funds, or other remedies permitted under the law.
