The Health Resources and Services Administration highlighted on Monday $140 million in newly opened grant funding opportunities focused on rural health priorities such as substance use treatment, workforce development and telehealth.
Applications for the slew of grants opened over the last few weeks and are set to close throughout July.
HRSA and its administrator, Tom Engels, who promoted the funding opportunities during a Monday event at an Iowa critical access hospital, said the programs build on the administration’s priorities of addressing opioid addiction as well as rural healthcare sustainability, the latter of which includes the ongoing $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program.
“These funding opportunities support state and local organizations that understand their communities’ unique needs and are best positioned to deliver solutions,” Engels said in a statement. “By strengthening rural health care systems, expanding access to quality care, investing in telehealth innovation and supporting the rural health workforce, HRSA is helping ensure that people living in rural America have the opportunity to lead healthier lives and that their communities remain strong for generations to come.”
The largest opportunity of the bunch is the Rural Communities Opioid Response Program, a multi-year effort to reduce morbidity and mortality related to substance use disorder. HRSA will be awarding $64 million to dozens of recipients to support evidence-based prevention, treatment and recover services, care coordination, substance use disorder workforce and community networks, with $4 million of the total for “first-step” efforts among “rural communities that may find the logistics or requirements of larger, more complex federal grant programs to be barriers to accessing start-up support.”
Over $11 million will go to the Rural Residency Planning and Development Program, which will help establish new accredited training programs that HRSA hopes will increase the likelihood that participating physicians will plant roots in underserved rural communities.
Another $7 million will be split across three different programs that help independent providers collaborate on more coordinated or expanded service delivery. One of these, the $3 million Rural Health Network Advancement Program, is a pilot that will offer individual awards of up to $500,000 to rural hospitals and clinics collaborating on increasingly popular integrated networks.
“[The Rural Health Network Advancement Program] bridges support to offset small scale structural barriers that make it difficult for rural providers to compete in an increasingly consolidated health care system landscape and is designed to help bring economic efficiencies to small independent rural entities by expanding and enhancing their ability to strengthen operations, preserve existing services, and build new lines of care through integrated network collaboration that preserves local autonomy,” according to the program’s Notice of Funding Opportunity.
HRSA also highlighted, among the rural health grant funding opportunities, a pair of telehealth programs offering just shy of $9.7 million. One of these earmarks $5.4 million for telehealth networks specializing in nutritional services to head off or manage chronic disease, while the other will dole out $4.3 million for technology-enabled collaborative learning.
Substance use disorder prevention and treatment efforts were the centerpiece of the $700 million tranche of federal grant funding unveiled earlier this month by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Those funding opportunities included $96 million for a new effort, the Safety Through Recovery, Engagement, and Evidence-based Treatment and Support (STREETS) Program, which will task recipient communities with developing comprehensive care systems for people who are homeless and have substance use disorders, serious mental illness, or co-occurring disorders.
The Rural Health Transformation Program, meanwhile, is a $10 billion-a-year vehicle overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services through 2030. Awards handed out by the agency to all 50 states more heavily rewarded applications focused on administration priorities, like chronic disease prevention and telehealth, but are governed by some restrictive guidelines and pale in comparison to the sweeping federal funding cuts they were intended to offset, critics have said.