The Health Resources and Services Administration on Monday highlighted newly opened $140 million grant funding opportunities focused on local health priorities such as substance use treatment, workforce development and telehealth.
Applications for a number of grants have opened in recent weeks and are expected to close in July.
HRSA and its Administrator Tom Engels, who touted the funding opportunity at an event held Monday at an Iowa critical access hospital, said the program builds on the administration’s priorities of addressing opioid addiction and rural health care sustainability, the latter of which includes the ongoing $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program.
“These funding opportunities support state and local organizations that are best positioned to understand the unique needs of their communities and provide solutions,” Engels said in a statement. “By strengthening rural health systems, expanding access to quality care, investing in telehealth innovation, and supporting rural health workers, HRSA is ensuring rural America has the opportunity to live healthier lives and helping their communities remain strong for generations to come.”
The biggest opportunity is the Rural Opioid Response Program, a multi-year effort to reduce morbidity and mortality associated with substance use disorders. HRSA will award $64 million to dozens of recipients to support evidence-based prevention, treatment, and recovery services, care coordination, and substance use disorder workforce and community networks, with $4 million of the total going to “first-stage” efforts in “rural areas where the logistics and requirements of larger and more complex federal grant programs may create barriers to accessing start-up assistance.”
More than $11 million will be donated to the Rural Training Program Development Program. This will help establish a new accredited training program that HRSA hopes will increase the likelihood that participating physicians will establish roots in underserved and rural areas.
An additional $7 million will be split between three different programs to help independent providers work together to deliver more coordinated or expanded services. One of these, the $3 million Rural Health Network Advancing Program, is a pilot offering individual incentives of up to $500,000 to rural hospitals and clinics that collaborate in the increasingly popular integrated networks.
According to the program’s funding opportunity notice, “[The Rural Health Network Advancement Program]provides a bridge of support to offset the small structural barriers that make it difficult for rural health care providers to compete in an increasingly integrated health system environment. “It is designed to help bring economic efficiencies to small, independent, local businesses by expanding and strengthening their capacity to strengthen operations, maintain existing services, and build new lines of care through integrated network cooperation that maintains local autonomy.”
HRSA also highlighted two telehealth programs providing just under $9.7 million among rural health grant funding opportunities. One will be allocated $5.4 million for a telehealth network dedicated to nutrition services to prevent or manage chronic diseases, and the other will be allocated $4.3 million for technology-enabled collaborative learning.
Efforts to prevent and treat substance use disorders were the centerpiece of a $700 million federal grant announced earlier this month by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. These funding opportunities included $96 million through the Safety through Recovery, Engagement, and Evidence-Based Treatments and Supports (STREETS) program, a new initiative that challenges recipient communities to develop comprehensive systems of care for people experiencing homelessness, substance use disorders, severe mental illness, or other conditions. Co-occurring disorders.
Meanwhile, the Rural Health Transformation Program is a $10 billion annual undertaking overseen by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services through 2030. Critics say the awards distributed by the agency to all 50 states are weighted toward applications that focus on government priorities such as chronic disease prevention and telemedicine, but are governed by a few narrow guidelines and pale in comparison to the deep cuts in federal funding they were meant to offset.
