How the Rural Health Atlas works

The CMS Rural Health Transformation Program is putting fifty billion dollars into rural health over five years, and the funding flows through the states. The problem is that every state runs its program differently. Awards, program rules, eligible uses of funds and the documents behind them are published separately, on different schedules and in different formats. The Rural Health Atlas brings that material into one system.

The awards

For each published funding decision, the Atlas records the recipient, what the award funds, the amount when disclosed, and the source document. Every funded award in the Atlas names its recipient and cites its source, and it watches state funding pages in every state. That turns thousands of pages of scattered state material into one record of where rural health dollars are going.

The organizations

The Atlas covers more than 30,000 healthcare organizations and sites across all fifty states. The national base is built from federal registries, and it holds critical access hospitals, rural hospitals, rural emergency hospitals, rural health clinics, federally qualified health centers and their individual sites.

State by state, the Atlas adds the other organizations a program's own eligibility words make eligible:

• Emergency medical services agencies.
• Local public health departments.
• Community mental health centers.
• Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics.
• Tribal health entities.

Each of those rosters is loaded whole for the state that needs it.

The vendors

The Atlas tracks close to 1,000 healthcare companies selling into rural health, across areas including workforce, behavioral health, EHR and health IT, remote patient monitoring, telehealth, care coordination, analytics, imaging and diagnostics, and EMS.

It does more than sort those companies into categories. The Atlas reads the scope of the published awards and uses a proprietary fit-ranking system to work out which categories of companies are most relevant to what that funding is meant to buy. For a healthcare company, the result is a ranked set of organizations that have been funded for work related to what you sell, with the published award and the source document behind every one. Instead of starting with a list of rural hospitals and asking who might be interested, you can start with who has already been funded for the problem you solve.

Write to me

Tell me what you sell, or what you are applying to build, and I will show you where it sits in the program and what the state documents say about it.

Email justin@ruralhealthdesk.com or call (847) 989-1727.