Tag Archives: rural22

Closing health care gaps in rural America

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Katti Gray, AHCJ’s core topic leader on mental health, moderates “Building the rural health care pipeline” panel at Rural Health Journalism Workshop 2022. Panelists Leslie Griffin, M.D., program director of family medicine residency at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine Chattanooga and Lisa D. Beasley, D.N.P., A.P.R.N., N.P.-C., R.N., assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and president of the Tennessee Nurses Association, are sitting to the right of the podium.

Imagine driving an hour for a colonoscopy. Because of limited access to health care, that’s the harsh reality for many people living in rural communities, said Leslie Griffin, M.D., program director of family medicine residency at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine Chattanooga, during the “How to build a rural health pipeline” panel at AHCJ’s Rural Health Workshop 2022 in Chattanooga, Tenn.

During the talk, moderated by AHCJ core topic leader on mental health Katti Gray, Griffin explained to journalists how she’s using her platform to encourage more medical students and physicians to train and practice in rural communities.

Other featured panelists included Ashoke “Bappa” Mukherji, chief executive officer of the Java Medical Group — which has been buying and reopening rural hospitals — and Lisa Beasley, D.N.P., A. P.R.N., N.P.-C., R.N., a nurse practitioner, assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and president of the Tennessee Nurses Association.

During the panel, speakers emphasized the dire need to address the physician and nurse practitioner shortage in rural America, discussed barriers to recruitment in these areas, offered solutions to providing more health care access to rural communities and presented story ideas for journalists to explore.

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Managing Editor Erica Tricarico is a graduate of Howard University and the master’s program in journalism at CUNY. Tricarico comes to AHCJ from MJH Life Sciences in Cranbury, N.J., where she managed an editorial team producing content on animal care. Before that, she was a freelance health care reporter for Everyday Health.

4 ways to ramp up your reporting on rural hospitals

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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.

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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 American Heart Association News and WebMD.

Rural health stories everywhere, workshop participants say

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Attendees listen attentively during the “Hiding in plain sight: Finding data and research about rural health” panel. (Photo courtesy of Margarita Martín-Hidalgo Birnbaum)

Finding and parsing rural health data, tracking COVID-19’s curve in rural regions, the promise and limitations of telemedicine for rural health consumers, and reopening rural hospitals were among the topics tackled at AHCJ’s Rural Health Workshop 2022. (Check out full panel recordings on the Rural Health Workshop 2022 landing page.)

During the first in-person Rural Health Workshop since 2019 in Denver, expert panelists also cited ongoing gaps in care for rural patients and shared innovations for filling some of those voids.

The one-day workshop was hosted by the University of Tennessee School of Medicine Chattanooga; the University of Tennessee Health Science Center College of Nursing; Cempa Community Care and Erlanger Health System. Sponsors were The Commonwealth Fund; the Helmsley Charitable Trust; and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Stories about health in far-flung, medically underserved places are fodder for journalists and essential to improving rural health care, said Rob Headrick, M.D., CHI Memorial Rees Skillern Cancer Institute’s chief of thoracic surgery.

“The challenge for us is how to combine your skills and mine … ” Headrick said during the panel “Bringing health care to the people: mobile screening and other routes to prevention.”

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Katti Gray (@kattigray) is AHCJ's core topic leader for behavioral and mental health. A former Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow, Gray is providing resources to help AHCJ members expand their coverage of mental health amid ongoing efforts to de-stigmatize mental illness and to place mental health care on par with all health care.

As opioid settlement money comes in, experts say journalists must demand accountability

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Photo courtesy of Joanne DeCaro

As millions of opioid settlement dollars flow into states, substance use disorder experts at AHCJ’s Rural Health Workshop 2022 said reporters should “follow the money” and hold officials and programs accountable for using that money to fund evidence-based programs.

“That’s what we didn’t see implemented and really borne out within the tobacco settlement,” said Sonia Canzater, J.D., M.P.H., associate director of the Hepatitis Policy Project at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, referring to the $246 billion major U.S. tobacco companies agreed to pay states in 1998 over 25 years as part of the Master Settlement Agreement.

Similar to that pact, pharmaceutical companies have agreed to pay roughly $26 billion to settle a barrage of lawsuits from states that allege those companies are partly to blame for the nation’s deadly opioid epidemic.

Brian Winbigler, Pharm.D., M.B.A., an assistant professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy and Translational Science at the University of Tennessee College of Pharmacy, said opioid settlement funds should go to evidence-based programs, such as those that facilitate medication-assisted treatment and harm-reduction programs.

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Elizabeth Fite is a health care reporter with the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

A growing demand for telehealth services in rural U.S.

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The Walnut Street Pedestrian Bridge in Chattanooga, Tenn. (Photo courtesy of Margarita Martín-Hidalgo Birnbaum)

Americans living in rural areas are less likely to use telehealth services than urban residents. The reasons are not unique to them: they may have concerns about giving private information over the internet or don’t know how to find their way around technology. But slow internet speed and reliability problems appear to most affect access to telehealth services in those communities.

That suggests that people in those parts of the United States may not be getting access to quality health care in part because “if you are getting spotty access, you’re not going to have a real consult,” Sinsi Hernández-Cancio, J.D, a vice president at the National Partnership for Women & Families. Hernández-Cancio said the demand for those telehealth services during the coronavirus pandemic underscored the need to upgrade older telecommunications infrastructure in less dense areas of the United States and exposed technological shortcomings in telehealth and user barriers to it.

The state of internet services infrastructure was among the equity measures that health care experts discussed in “The truth about telemedicine: promise and limitations,” a panel at Rural Health Workshop 2022 in Chattanooga, Tenn. The daylong event held on July 14, 2022, included sessions about finding trend data on rural areas and efforts to recruit people to the nursing profession to serve less populated areas of the country.


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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 American Heart Association News and WebMD.