Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced during National Health IT week that the U.S Department of Agriculture (USDA) has entered into a partnership with HHS and the Office of the National Coordinator to expand funding for advanced healthcare technology in rural America.
In addition, USDA is partnering not only with HHS but also with the VA to provide funds to support advanced healthcare technology in rural hospitals. This partnership is an extension of a successful pilot launched in Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, and Texas to identify rural critical access hospitals in persistent poverty areas that need advanced healthcare technology.
In general, the UDSA’s Rural Development programs provide funding for rural health IT infrastructure and funding to expand local access to high quality healthcare services. For example, the USDA’s Community Facilities Loan and Grant Program provides funds to construct, enlarge, or improve community facilities for healthcare public safety and public services.
For example, in Illinois, the Community Memorial Hospital Association received $8,000,000 from a Community Facilities loan to improve emergency services, centralize outpatient testing and services, and improve patient registration.
Rural Economic Development grants and loans are available to provide technical assistance and training. In Iowa, the Henry County Health Center received almost $800,000 from a Rural Economic Development Grant and loan to purchase equipment for their surgical and outpatient departments.
Since 1993, USDA initiated the Distance Learning and Telemedicine (DLT) Grant Program to provide both educational and healthcare opportunities in rural communities through grants to finance advanced telecommunications technologies. So far, the DLT program has funded more than 1,400 projects totaling $512 million.
Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), USDA’s Rural Utilities Services (RUS) received $2.5 billion to facilitate broadband in rural communities. RUS can use the funds to provide loans, grants and combinations of loans and grants.
A new announcement made on September 19th reports that RUS has been able to made $40 million in loans to fund the installation of fiber networks to improve telecommunications capability in three specific service areas. The USDA Telecommunications Loan Program funds for specific service areas will go to a telephone company in Iowa and one in Oregon, and funds will also go to a telecommunications company in South Dakota and one in Minnesota.
In addition, the Community-Oriented Connectivity Broadband Grant program or referred to as Community Connect provides grants to eligible applicants to establish broadband service in rural areas where no broadband service exists today.
States can also address their specific needs. For example, in Iowa several groups are working together to help provide IT in their local rural communities. The USDA Rural Development Iowa State Office, the Iowa Regional Health IT Extension Center, and the Iowa State Office of Rural Health met last June to form the first Iowa Rural Health IT Forum. The purpose was to launch a pilot project designed to expand funding for rural health IT infrastructure to support Critical Access Hospitals (CAH) and rural hospitals in the state.