HRSA’s Rural Health Care Services Outreach Grant Program, a three year program awards $200,000 each year to expand healthcare delivery in rural areas. The projects must demonstrate creative or effective models of outreach and delivery. The community serviced should be involved in the development and ongoing operation of the program to address the needs of the population.
Funding can be used to meet a broad range of healthcare needs from health promotion and disease prevention, to expanding oral and mental health services, to case management for rural HIV patients.
One outreach grant program currently taking place in rural Wisconsin, is using telemedicine to meet the needs of the mentally ill. The Prairie du Chien Memorial Hospital a Critical Access Hospital doing business as Crossing Rivers Health (CRH) www.crossingrivers.org is designing and implementing a telemedicine system to provide mental health services in the rural southwest part of the state.
The project budget for the program has been designed to support full-scale sustainability and to ensure all required technology and equipment necessary is purchased and used during the initial project period. Over three years, at least 1,500 patients will be using telemedicine capabilities.
Each patient will be tracked with information on their progress, care received, medicines prescribed, and status updates. Baseline measures will be collected with ongoing monitoring occurring every 90 days for individual screening. Technology will make it possible to compare clinical results by sub-groups so that the consortium will be able to measure differences in impact among unique populations sectors.
A full time psychiatrist will be hired to address any critical gaps in services and the psychiatrists will divide their time among five unique sites while managing a caseload of about 1,250 patients. The addition of telemedicine technologies will permit the psychiatrist and existing mental health staff to work over a secure network with patients in crisis.
The use of telemedicine will enable patients to have more frequent contact with their clinicians, and will dramatically reduce the waiting time for those wishing to schedule an immediate appointment.
Go to www.hrsa.gov.ruralhealth/about/community/careservicesoutreach.html for more information on the HRSA grant program.
Go to www.raconline.org/pdf/2015-2018-rural-health-care-services-outreach-grant-grantee-directory.pdf for information from HRSA’s Directory titled “Rural Health Care Services Outreach Grant Program 2015-2018”.
The contact for the Wisconsin grant is Rick Peterson at Rick.perterson@crossingrivers.org. For information on the grant program and grantees throughout the country, email Linda Kwon at lkwon@hrsa.gov.
The next competitive grant RFP for this grant program is expected to be available in Summer/Fall 2017 for a May 1, 2018 start date.