The Rural Health Transformation Program: A $50 Billion Opportunity for Digital Acceleration and Solutions for Clinics

Rural health care organizations provide a critical safety net for approximately 20% of the US population, including significant numbers of older adults and people from historically underserved socioeconomic communities.

Despite serving these higher-needs populations – with the added challenges of geographic barriers – rural health care organizations are also severely short-staffed, underfunded, and are being forced to shutter their doors at an unsustainable pace.

To combat the risks of leaving huge swathes of the US without access to necessary inpatient, emergency, and outpatient services, Congress enacted the Rural Health Transformation Program, which includes $50 billion in funding for rural health.

The funding will be distributed in $10 billion installments between fiscal years (FY) 2026 and 2030, with half of each year’s funding distributed equally among all states and the other 50% distributed according to demonstrated need.

States will need to apply for each portion of the funding, which can be spent on pre-approved areas of care transformation strategies and technologies for the providers and health systems in their regions.

What do rural health care organizations need to know about how to participate in the Rural Health Transformation Program?

Choosing the right technology for rural health programs: A guide for clinical leaders

State officials will need to work closely with the provider community to develop an application for workload funds, which means executive leaders at rural health care organizations should take time to identify their areas of greatest need – and have their detailed operations and technology wish lists ready to go.

These applications should include specific technologies to support areas of improvement that can have an outsized impact on care delivery for high-needs rural populations, such as workforce development, recruitment and retention; evidence-based clinical care delivery; and technology to support sustained high-quality outcomes.

For example, trusted and workflow-friendly access to the latest clinical guidelines and drug decision support is essential for both physicians and nurses working in high-complexity, limited resource environments like rural hospitals. Without easy access to many types of specialists, clinicians practicing in rural settings need a clinical equalizer to help them make the right decisions for their patients in the moment. These resources also help address gaps in clinical guidelines/protocols that influence outcomes.

Evidence-based clinical decision support solutions, such as Wolters Kluwer’s widely used UpToDate. For over 30 years, clinicians and care teams have trusted UpToDate for clear answers and recommendations to support their treatment of patients. UpToDate can quickly provide answers directly in the EHR to demonstrably reduce diagnostic errors, improve the delivery of standardized care , and sharpen performance on clinical quality measures.

In addition, Lippincott Solutions provides workforce development resources across a nurse's career, including leadership development programs, alongside robust point of care resources to ensure the delivery of high-quality patient care by the clinical care team. Furthermore, Lippincott Solutions provides quality improvement resources such as guidelines to improve the delivery of standardized nursing care plans, and actions plans to address nursing sensitive indicators linked to value-based care outcomes.

Similarly, digital tools can help tackle medication errors, which are often more common in small hospitals. Medication errors are now the third-leading cause of death in the US, contributing to approximately 200,000 avoidable deaths per year. In environments with limited pharmacy or specialist support, like many rural health organizations, digital tools are essential for offering guidance on dosing, flagging potential adverse interactions, avoiding drug diversion, and enhancing antimicrobial stewardship.

Rural health leaders should look for integrated, evidence-based solutions like UpToDate Lexidrug, Sentri7 Drug Diversion, and Sentri7 Antimicrobial Stewardship and AUR Reporting to support clinical care teams in appropriately managing medication safety for their patients and improving regulatory compliance. Ovid Synthesis can also provide a web-based platform, with executive dashboards, to enables organizations to identify clinical or operational improvement initiatives, convene an interprofessional team from across the organization to systematically address the issue, quantify the improvement with an ROI calculator and sustain and spread the improvement.

For rural populations, who may have limited access to follow-up appointments, clear and understandable patient education is also crucial. UpToDate Patient Education solutions provide plain-language, culturally sensitive, and multilingual materials that improve health literacy. Helping patients understand their conditions and adhere to treatment plans is essential for managing chronic disease effectively and may result in lower hospital readmission rates.

All of these areas align tightly with the Rural Health Transformation Program’s focus on improving care quality, strengthening the skills and productivity of a limited workforce, and reducing the incidence of avoidable adverse events that lead to higher spending, increased utilization, and poor patient outcomes.

By advocating for funding for these types of tools, rural health leaders can multiply the productivity and effectiveness of the workforce while providing a layer of trusted support and specialty-level knowledge for clinicians who must often wear many hats in a time of ongoing workforce shortages.