Nearly one in five Americans (16%) lives in rural areas, and thanks to the newly formed White House Rural Council, rural healthcare will be getting some much-needed federal attention. The council aims to better coordinate federal programs and maximize investments in rural communities.
The council's work, outlined in an executive order will be spread across executive departments, agencies, and offices to develop policy recommendations and coordinate the Obama administration's engagement with rural communities. It's headed by the Secretary of Agriculture, and its members include the heads of other departments, including HHS.
Among the council's priorities is improving access to and quality of healthcare, and the National Rural Health Association applauded its creation, saying on its blog that it's "pleased rural health is priority."
"We are delighted with the creation of the White House Rural Council," Alan Morgan, the National Rural Health Association's CEO said in an e-mail to HealthLeaders Media. "This is something we have supported in the past as a means to better coordinate rural issues across sector within the federal government. However, for this new council to be successful, it will need to place health and healthcare front and center within its discussions."
The council will also focus on job creation and economic development by increasing the flow of capital to rural areas, promoting innovation, and expanding digital and physical networks, the executive order said. In the healthcare arena, this translates to expanding health technology systems.
"A coordinated approach to expanding rural health information technology within the federal government is essential, and it must be a priority moving forward," Morgan said.
While the field of telehealth is still emerging, and there's anecdotal evidence of its benefits there haven't been a lot of long-term studies to quantify it.
But researchers are working on quantifying results. Health IT research projects funded by HHS are already proving successful in the case of an Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality project showing that widely available technology, expert training, and real-time feedback can help treat patients in underserved areas who have the Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection.
During the study, researchers at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center (UNMHSC) developed a model called Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes, or ECHO. Using videoconference or teleconference lines, community-based medical teams take part in weekly clinics with specialists and discuss patients' medical history, review lab results and other findings, as well as collaborate on treatment plans.
Study authors examined outcomes for 407 patients undergoing treatment for HCV infection at 21 community settings, including five prisons and a UNMHSC-affiliated clinic in Albuquerque. They found that the HCV infection was cured at a similar rate for patients who were treated at these community-based settings as patients who were treated at the university clinic (58.2% vs. 57.5%).
"Project ECHO demonstrates that we can solve the problems of underserved communities by empowering primary care clinicians to provide high-quality specialty care locally," Sanjeev Arora, M.D., the liver disease specialist at UNMHSC who created Project ECHO, said in a statement.
The study appears in the June 2 online issue of the New England Journal of Medicine and in the June 9 print edition.
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Alexandra Wilson Pecci is an editor for HealthLeaders.
