About Margarita Martín-Hidalgo Birnbaum
Margarita Martín-Hidalgo Birnbaum (@mbirnbaumnews) is AHCJ's Health Equity Core Topic Leader. An independent journalist who has covered health disparities. Birnbaum’s stories have been published by WebMD, American Heart Association News, and American Indian, the magazine of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.
From left to right: Sarah Jane Tribble, senior correspondent with Kaiser Health News and featured luncheon speaker Stephanie Boynton, F.A.C.H.E., vice president and chief executive officer of critical access hospitals for Erlanger Bledsoe Hospital and Erlanger Western Carolina Hospital.
When reporting on the state of rural medical facilities, there’s more to the story than the demand for health care services. Other factors influence the survival, closure, or changes to services offered by providers in more sparsely populated areas. The economic prosperity of those regions, for instance, appears to be tightly intertwined with the type and quality of care accessible to the people who live there — who tend to be in worse health than their urban peers.
That was among the potential story threads that emerged during a presentation at AHCJ’s Rural Health Journalism Workshop 2022 in Chattanooga earlier this month. Stephanie Boynton, F.A.C.H.E., featured luncheon speaker and vice president and CEO of critical access hospitals for Erlanger Bledsoe Hospital and Erlanger Western Carolina Hospital, talked about the impact of Erlanger Health System’s acquisition of facilities in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina.
Boynton described the perilous situation the hospitals were in. “Word was out: we weren’t paying vendors, we weren’t paying employees,” she said. “Well, we were paying them, but we were holding [the checks] to the eleventh hour. That gets out in the community, and people doubt the services that you offer.”
Those credibility issues went away when Erlanger, based in Chattanooga, stepped in — not just with cash but also credibility, she said.
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Margarita Martín-Hidalgo Birnbaum (@mbirnbaumnews) is AHCJ's Health Equity Core Topic Leader. An independent journalist who has covered health disparities. Birnbaum’s stories have been published by WebMD, American Heart Association News, and American Indian, the magazine of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.
