Dec 28, 2022
Top 10 Rural Monitor Articles of 2022
Here is a countdown of the most-read articles of the year:
#10 – From Idea to Reality: Federal Funding Supports Quapaw Nation's Community Paramedicine Program
By leveraging federal COVID-related
funding, the Quapaw Nation now serves its local residents
with a new community paramedicine program. Current
program data indicates that it's bringing significant
cost savings, along with valuable information for future
local healthcare delivery decision-making. Most
importantly, the program is also proving to be widely
acceptable to community members.
Published February 16, 2022
#9 – 'Filling the Cracks': How a Rural Maine Community Kept its 24/7 Urgent Care Open with Paramedics
To keep 24/7 urgent care available in Maine's Moose
River Valley, a new pilot program lets paramedics take
shifts staffing the local health center after-hours and
on weekends.
Published October 5, 2022
#8 – Educating Future Healthcare Providers: Health Literacy Opportunities for Webside Manners
Health literacy experts share
that as healthcare delivery moves from bedside to
webside, new opportunities for health literacy education
arise. Emphasizing the need to swap medical jargon for
plain language, educators outlined best practices for
teaching health literacy principles to healthcare
profession trainees.
Published March 9, 2022
#7 – Staving Off One's Mortality: Rural Kidney Health and Its Disparities
For the 240,000 rural Americans with complete
kidney failure, it's likely that very few knew they even
had kidney disease. According to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, kidney disease is usually silent;
90% of people with kidney disease don't know they have
it. With research pointing to the high costs of kidney
disease for pediatric and adult patients alike
— mostly covered by Medicare —
experts and researchers discuss rural disparities around
access to disease-stabilizing treatment and to renal
replacement therapies.
Published June 15, 2022
#6 – Training Rural to Serve Rural: Baccalaureate-MD Programs and Their Rural Results
Rural healthcare delivery
experts continue to emphasize the critical need for rural
workforce. Using uniquely designed combined
baccalaureate/medical degree programs, two
university-based medical education teams shared not only
the successes in training and placing physicians in rural
areas — but the unique impact their
service-oriented students and programs have on their
academic environment.
Published August 3, 2022
#5 – Wiping Away the Tears: Addressing Increasing Death in Rural America
Rural mortality rates had been
improving until recent years when a perfect storm of the
opioid epidemic and COVID-19 pandemic converged to
reverse these gains. However, federally funded efforts
have sought to stem the tide through community, clinical,
and policy efforts.
Published July 13, 2022
#4 – A partnership between a Federally Qualified Health Center and the local ambulance district in Washington County, Missouri lets chronically ill patients access preventive care from the comfort of home.
Published August 17, 2022
#3 – The Codes of Care: How Words and Numbers Have Transformative Power for Rural Healthcare
The greatest opportunity to tell
the rural healthcare delivery story is an opportunity
often missed — and that opportunity involves
translating clinical documentation into medical codes. In
addition to describing how the story and quality of
clinical care gets translated from words into
alphanumeric numbers, medical coding experts also pointed
to aligned efforts to familiarize those in graduate
medical education settings with the impact of their
clinical documentation.
Published April 13, 2022
#2 – Bringing
Mental Health Services to Rural Residents
A new library initiative in Texas and an established crisis line in Georgia are bringing mental health services directly to rural residents through teams of lay mental health workers and mental health professionals.
Published May 4, 2022
#1 – A New Era of Health Literacy? Expanded Definitions, Digital Influences, and Rural Inequities
The priority for rural population
health is access, including access to health information
needed to make personal health decisions. Two of the
nation's health literacy experts join a federal agency
official to review current rural challenges of accessing
health information that is clear and usable. Along with
an exploration of digital health literacy, recently
expanded definitions of health literacy are discussed.
Published February 2, 2022