Meeting Hospitals Where They Are

By Cassity Avila

Rural hospital staff are working overtime to combat the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. They need actionable and relevant information about finances, hiring practices, patient engagement, and everything in between, which is where the Center for Optimizing Rural Health (CORH) comes in.

CORH hosts at least one webinar each month on a topic directly pertaining to rural healthcare to provide hospitals timely knowledge right away.

At the start of each program year, CORH asks hospitals about their top priorities or challenges and what kind of information would be most helpful. Using that feedback, CORH builds the calendar of webinars led by experienced subject matter experts on topics designed to hospitals’ most pressing challenges.

These webinars are completely free and open to anyone, regardless of the attendee’s involvement with CORH. It all ties back to CORH’s mission of providing expert guidance and tools to increase hospital capacity and improve rural health.

Topics range from patient safety to community engagement to quality improvement. Financial management is a concern for every hospital, so CORH frequently hosts sessions on coding, billing, chargemaster issues, and revenue cycle management.

We hope you’ll join us for an upcoming session. In May, Bree Watzak, PharmD, BCPS, CORH’s Director of Technical Assistance and Misti Carter, PhD, JD, Director of Research at the Texas A&M Rural and Community Health Institute, will discuss why feedback is important to healthcare teams, as well as describe models and outline tools for providing effective, difficult feedback.

Later in the month, I will lead a webinar to define eligibility criteria and discuss the application process for CORH’s rural hospital assistance program, which provides targeted in-depth guidance to rural hospitals. The goal of the program is to give rural hospitals the advice and tools they need to clear their biggest hurdles and operate more efficiently, ensuring that residents in rural communities continue to have access to essential health services.

Rural hospitals often have extremely limited resources. That is why CORH’s webinars are ideal for attendees—on-topic, brief, free, and actionable—giving hospitals the information they need quickly so they can focus on helping their community.