A Playbook for New Rural Healthcare Partnership Models of Investment

Many rural communities across the country face challenges in meeting community needs around health, workforce development, financial stability, infrastructure and more. However there are calls to change the narrative around areas existing outside of urban centers, to recognize the unique assets embedded in these enduring rural communities.

The healthcare industry is a vital player in rural communities, shaping a vision for growth. Often, healthcare organizations are one of the biggest employers in rural areas, impacting communities through their anchor roles and serving an influential role as local conveners able to align groups to address crucial data and build partnerships across sectors.

A Playbook for New Rural Healthcare Partnership Models of Investments, from PHI’s Build Healthy Places Network, is an action-oriented guide designed for healthcare organizations who want to pursue partnerships with rural communities, economic development and other sectors, to create the community conditions that support improved health. It includes case studies from across the country and four core strategies used by healthcare entities as examples for future multi-sector rural partnerships to follow.

Central Strategies for Collaboration & Partnerships

The report identifies four broad strategies that the healthcare sector can use to collaborate with cross-sector partners for rural health and prosperity:

1. Strengthening Economic Opportunity and Workforce Support: Economic stability and community health are interdependent: one cannot be sustained without the other. As anchor institutions and major employers, rural healthcare organizations are often significant economic drivers in the communities that surround them. Additionally, lack of economic stability is a major factor in poor health outcomes, so the fate and stability of rural healthcare institutions, both as service providers and as employers and economic drivers, can impact community health. As employers, competitive recruitment and retention of healthcare staff is a challenge for many rural hospitals. In a competitive market, sufficient housing and childcare opportunities can be critical strategies in recruiting great candidates. This strategy deploys economic and workforce development strategies to create stability and increase health outcomes. It includes strengthening local career pathways, healthcare workforce housing for recruitment and retention and access to childcare.
2. Supporting Local Control: Increasingly, rural healthcare is deploying strategies to support community ownership models that help close the racial wealth and health gap. These models are geared toward supporting collective ownership of land through a land trust, promoting food sovereignty or the right to healthy, culturally appropriate food defined by a community’s own agricultural systems, or advocating for policy change to advance community investment or needed land use changes.
3.  Strengthening Infrastructure to Support Healthcare Access: This strategy seeks to build and strengthen the infrastructure that supports healthcare delivery and responds to the challenges of physically connecting rural healthcare with those needing services. The work can take several forms, such as collaborating with partners to co-locate services to improve access, supporting community hubs for health, expanding reach through broadband availability, or improving transportation for individuals to access needed services.
4.  Increasing Resources: A common strategy for healthcare investment in rural development is increasing access to resources. Successful approaches can include diversifying the funding base and finding innovative resources, such as a hospital’s use of general obligation bonds and loans to fund a New Market Tax Credit allocation. Another trend is to donate land to support community-based projects such as affordable or supportive housing. An increasing number of healthcare institutions are reaching out to partners in rural community development that have expertise in creatively deploying capital in support of housing, workforce development, and other issues central to rural healthcare’s impact on community health.

Building Healthy Communities Through Strategic Partnerships ORH Population Health Series

In June 2023, BHPN staff presented on the “Building Healthy Communities Through Strategic Partnerships” webinar with the Oregon Office of Rural Health. The session focused on why place matters and the impact it has on the health and well-being of communities. Take a deeper dive into the case studies that were shared from the Rural Playbook for Healthcare Investment and learn how to implement the playbook’s tool, the 5-step Pathway to Successful Cross-sector Partnerships.