Rural health

I will say this.

When it comes to healthcare in general, whether it's our elders or our young, the rural healthcare initiative started by Trump this year and the dollars that are coming back to the states, they are gonna have a huge impact.

on healthcare, the quality of healthcare and the availability of healthcare in South Dakota in a big way.

In the last three and a half years, we have wired the state with high-speed internet.

We've invested like over $350 million in the last three years.

You combine that with the $189 million that was appropriated to us this year through that program to go to rural healthcare.

It's going to move the needle a huge amount in the next few years.

In fact, in the next five years, we're expecting around another billion dollars to come to South Dakota.

Well, I'm glad you did write it.

And I'm also really glad that you are speaking to rural healthcare.

So I live in Georgia and You know, I think we think of Georgia as just Atlanta and maybe Savannah for being extra charitable.

But a lot of Georgia is really, really rural.

Even if you can connect a need to a particular line in a grant-making opportunity, there's still a lot more that needs to come together to make that program successful.

So if you were to ask what constraints are going to challenge our overall health care system in the next five years that this Rural Health Transformation Fund money is going towards, long-term care would be at the top of anyone's list as being an area for investment.

Hi, this is Kim Marcellus, editor of McKnight's Long-Term Care News.

Since last July, I've been reporting on the Rural Health Transformation Fund, trying to figure out how this five-year, $50 billion program would trickle down to states, and in particular, long-term care and skilled nursing care organizations.

Over the last two weeks, we're finally starting to get some details that look promising for providers in at least two states in terms of targeted funding, with broader approaches on things like workforce and technology helping out and several others.

Today, I'm joined by Helen Laban, Executive Director of the Vermont Healthcare Association, which leads advocacy efforts in what is the nation's most rural state.

We led with care for advancing dementia and

also individuals with substance use disorder.

There are others as well, as you know, we're pursuing.

the Rural Health Transformation Program.

But the governors know this, it's the single largest investment ever in rural healthcare, $50 billion over five years.

Every state got around $200 million every year for five years.

Sir, you don't put that kind of money into a program just to pay the bills.

You've delivered comprehensive care to 50,000 plus rural patients across more than 50 counties alongside 5,000 providers.

You have built a model on the simple yet really complex idea of better outcomes for all and did so through the development of the only AI native technology platform purpose-built to solve the rural health crisis.

Given that and given the progress that you have already made, how is this acquisition going to accelerate your mission and continue to close the rural care gap?

Yes.

So first of all, again, delighted to be here and we are really excited to be working with the CityBlock team.

How do we deliver care for patients with chronic kidney disease or other chronic diseases into very rural settings effectively and efficiently? And the data that we are using to gain those insights can stay right here and be analyzed right here, and we can bring partners like Precision Life in to do that analysis here within the, the sort of four walls of the community.

But the insights that we generate, we believe will be highly translatable to other rural care settings, both here in the US and abroad.

And I think that that's a great model for how to approach some of these questions, right? It's not an either/or, and there is really an opportunity for ideas to flow in and out of organizations.

But we can think about data residency of primary clinical data and primary genomic data.

I think the second piece about the portability of insights possibly is more straightforward when it's the type of output that- Precision Life would come and operate on data than perhaps some of the AI companies who've come in and they've trained a model, and it's not entirely transparent what those insights are contributing to the model, how enabling they are, what leaves, how is it used, is it being used in everybody's interest? Because once you have a black box you can't see into, those are legitimate questions, and I don't propose to get into the rights and wrongs or how you create an approach there.

But we're seeing it being solved around the world with sandboxes, et cetera.

I thought that the observation, though, about that rural care delivery was really powerful because speaking personally, I spent a lot of time in hospital as a child.

I can tell you that being treated for an asthma attack in Wales in the early 1970s was really good because I got my own Wendy house, i.e., oxygen tent, and I got ice cream the following day before I went home, which made it an absolute treat.

And this is going to be a great conversation.

We're going to talk about rural health transformation.

We're going to talk about access to health care.

And I just can't wait.

And I think that Community health centers who access their full market, their full service area, that's the only way they reach their full potential is trying to engage and embrace and attract everyone who needs them in their service area.

Absolutely.

And if I'm a community health center, I've been hearing a lot about the funding coming in for rural health transformation.

I think a lot of our listeners are really interested in maybe taking that next step to say, where do we go now? How do we access and how do we, as you mentioned, bring the provider to that population? So maybe talk about what's going on with rural health transformation and the grant funding there.