Author: Freddie Sanchez

Why inflationary challenges have been particularly challenging in purchased services categories.

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October 2022 – The Journal of Healthcare Contracting

Stronger consumer demand coupled with global supply chain and workforce challenges are driving inflation across every sector of the U.S. economy, including healthcare, said Mickey Meehan, chief operating officer, Conductiv^® and Chaun Powell, group vice president, Remitra^™. And while the U.S. has been seeing and living with higher costs from the gas pump to the grocery store, there has been less discussion about inflation in the services sector.

Part of the reason for that may be due to the complexities and variabilities of purchased services and the invoicing of those services. For example, at one large IDN, the chief supply chain officer shared with Meehan and Powell that departments and hospitals nationally lack the sophistication to accurately predict the expense of a service based on complexities of the contracts, which can be 70 pages long and filled with holiday, weekend and surge pricing models. “Add to that inflationary up-charging, and it becomes increasingly apparent that technology-based solutions are more critical today than ever before,” they said.

This time last year, services inflation sat at 3%. This year in the U.S., services inflation has increased – albeit slightly – from 6.22% in June to 6.25% in July, and its share of overall inflation also increased, Meehan and Powell noted.

Today, hospital expenses continue to climb while margins shrink – the median change in margin declined 49.3% from June 2021. “This makes inflation particularly challenging to tackle in healthcare,” they said. “Broader economy-wide inflation has serious implications for providers that must absorb added costs out of existing budgets, which are already strained as a result of lost elective procedure revenue, and record-high outlays to attract and retain labor.”

What’s more, as expenses are rising, hospital payments aren’t keeping pace. CMS has adjusted the IPPS payment rate upward 4.3%, but the truth remains the update falls woefully short of reflecting the rising labor costs that hospitals have experienced since the onset of the pandemic, Meehan and Powell said. “This inadequate payment bump will only exacerbate the intense financial pressures on hospitals.” 

The following are more insights on which services sectors have been hardest hit, and some possible solutions for supply chain teams to implement.

Categories that have seen the largest cost increase

When comparing third-party services to products, the total cost of the service is heavily influenced by the cost of labor, Meehan and Powell said. “In the current environment of competition for all labor types, organizations are factoring in higher wages to help attract and retain talent on top of higher prices for their business, such
as fuel costs.”

Based on these factors, some services categories in healthcare experiencing cost increases include:

• Staffing
• Construction
• Waste Management
• Blood Products
• Courier Services
• Food Services
• Environmental Services
• Third-Party Logistics

It’s not just purchased services

Labor costs are having an impact on other parts of the healthcare supply chain as well, Meehan and Powell said. “This is especially true in accounts payable (AP), where manual-based financial processes have led to wasted time and money for both providers and suppliers. In fact, nearly $40 billion in healthcare waste and inefficiencies is tied to invoicing errors alone.”  

A place to cut waste

One big opportunity to cut down on waste and create efficiencies is AP automation, they said. “With AP automation, providers can not only gain opportunities to strategically redeploy their labor force, but also gain better control over cash flow and the ability to unlock working capital for investing in future growth opportunities.”

The importance of a healthy market

Purchased services can account for up to 36% of hospitals’ annual indirect operating expenses. “Enterprise-wide success is increasingly reliant on purchased services and a healthy market can help generate operational efficiencies and improved outcomes for providers, including significant cost savings,” Meehan and Powell said.

This also extends to supply chain back-office operations, which is an area often overlooked by healthcare leaders as a significant opportunity to save on costs. “We estimate that as many as 70% of all invoices in healthcare are paper-based, and 68% of all healthcare purchasing is still done manually via paper checks. Across the healthcare industry, these transactions can add as much as $18 billion to $22 billion in unnecessary annual expenses.” AP automation can solve this by taking paper out of the equation and replacing it with a data- and technology-driven workflow.

Best practices to drive savings

“As the healthcare industry continues to transition into post-pandemic reality, finding new ways to increase efficiencies and reduce costs in purchased services – and in supply chain operations overall – is paramount,” Meehan and Powell said. They shared several ways healthcare providers can tackle the rising costs of services and drive savings:

“Leveraging the aggregate purchasing power of a GPO and contracts with firm, fixed pricing can help keep inflation at bay and reduce risk. Hospitals and health systems we’ve worked with have saved as much as 31% (weighted average) across purchased services categories during the pandemic and through a combination of GPO/local services-specific contracts.”

“Investing locally and building more strategic, collaborative relationships with diverse suppliers to drive competitive pricing and terms.”

“Using technology to tap into analytics, benchmarks and powerful insights to source competitive contracts and measure purchased services usage and spend. Technology can enable providers to automate RFPs, to compare prices, and to manage service targets – a strong means to counter inflation.”

“Looking beyond purchased services, technology can be used to analyze total supply spend, transform AP processes and find savings opportunities all in one place. By moving to an automated purchasing and payment solution, one health system we work with was able to recognize more than $1.8 million in savings in fewer than three years. Another was able to recoup $7 million in overpayments due to invoicing errors.”

Inflation and Purchased Services – The Journal of Healthcare Contracting (jhconline.com)

Mariah Taylor – Monday, October 17th, 2022

Hospitals across the country are seeing a significant surge of respiratory syncytial virus, NBC News reported Oct. 14. 

The volume of RSV patients is “two to three times what we’ve ever experienced,” John Bradley, MD, medical director of infectious diseases at San Diego-based Rady Children’s Hospital, said in the report.

Last week, nearly 5,000 tests came back positive for RSV, according to CDC data. “Some regions are nearing seasonal peak levels,” a CDC spokesperson told NBC News.

One physician from Baystate Children’s Hospital in Springfield, Mass., said her pediatric ICU was closed to new patients Oct. 12 because all beds were filled. During a normal winter, her emergency room sees around 100 children a day. Now it is seeing 130 to 150, many with RSV.

Many hospitals are sending patients to nearby states. A physician at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, R.I., said his hospital has been treating RSV patients from more than 100 miles away.

At Comer Children’s Hospital in Chicago, the emergency room is seeing a 150 percent higher volume than usual for October, and up to one-third of its ICU and emergency patients have RSV.

Physicians told NBC News that RSV is spreading earlier this year and is becoming more severe in some children because of a lack of exposure during the COVID-19 pandemic due to masking and social distancing.

RSV cases reaching ‘seasonal peak levels,’ CDC says (beckershospitalreview.com)

October 11, 2022 – According to a report from CNN, a union of railroad track maintenance workers has rejected a tentative agreement with the nation’s freight carrier. With this development, the possibility of a strike that shuts down the vital link in an already precarious supply chain is back. 

The deal in question included “an immediate 14% raise with back pay dating to 2020 and raises totaling 24% during the five-year life of the contract that runs from 2020 through 2024.” It also included cash bonuses of $1,000 a year for union members – with back pay and bonuses, that’s an average of $11,000 per worker after the deal is finalized.  

However, the financial terms were not the main issue with these new contracts, but because of “work rules that unions said had brought engineers and conductors to a breaking point. Staffing shortages had required crew members to be on call seven days a week, ready to work at short notice.” 

According to the report, the Biden administration is desperately trying to avoid a rail strike because of the current state of the supply chain. When measured by weight and distance traveled, the major railroads carry 30% of the country’s freight. A strike could be a devastating blow to the infrastructure of the supply chain.  

Learn More 

Filed Under: repConnect Feed, Repertoire’s Dail-eNews

Sept. 27, 2022, 10:25

• AMA, AHA dropping cases; may intervene in Texas case
• Texas judge has previously ruled in favor of providers

Medical providers are putting all their eggs in one basket by moving to support a federal lawsuit filed in Texas against the Biden administration’s No Surprises Act rule on settling payment disputes.

The Texas Medical Association, one doctor, and a hospital sued the US Department of Health and Human Services in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas on Sept. 22. The same week, the American Medical Association, and the American Hospital Association agreed to end their similar D.C.-based case and said they support the Texas case.

Medical providers and health insurers and employers that foot much of America’s health-care bill have been battling in court to try to ensure that the 2020 law designed to protect patients from many high out-of-network bills is implemented by arbitrators in a way that favors their side. The law is meant to prevent providers from billing patients in emergencies and in situations where patients have procedures at network facilities, but they are served by providers, such as anesthesiologists, who are not in their insurance network.

Rules implementing the law required arbitrators to select the amount closest to the median in-network rate in settling payment disputes between insurers and certain out-of-network health-care providers. Providers argue that relying on median contract rates gives insurers too much power, while payers say that allowing arbitrators to weigh many factors equally could inflate health-care costs.

“It seems like providers are clearing the decks for this to be litigated in Texas,” Katie Keith, director of the Health Policy and the Law Initiative at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University Law Center, said in an interview. Appeals would then go through the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, she said. Keith has been supportive of the administration’s rules implementing the dispute resolution provisions of the No Surprises Act.

Dispute Resolution Challenged

The lawsuit challenges the government’s August 2022 final rule regarding the No Surprises Act’s independent dispute resolution process. It’s the second time in less than a year that TMA has challenged federal agencies related to the same rulemaking. US District Judge Jeremy Kernodle previously ruled in favor of providers who challenged a rule issued by four federal agencies that gave preference to using the qualifying payment amount as the primary factor in deciding billing disputes.

“The Texas court previously held that the interim final rule impermissibly rewrote clear statutory terms by placing a thumb on the scale in favor of commercial insurers,” the AMA and the AHA said in a joint statement. “The final rule suffers from the same problems.”

The groups said they “want to see the law’s core patient protections move forward.”

“We look forward to supporting the Texas Medical Association’s efforts to restore the balanced, patient-friendly approach that Congress passed and the AHA and AMA supported,” the statement said.

In other words, Keith said, the provider organizations are saying, “‘We’re going to support this other challenge before a judge who I think has been sympathetic,’” to their arguments.

Several lawsuits were previously filed against the Biden administration’s 2021 interim final rule that instructed arbitrators to give precedence to the qualifying payment amount, based on median contract rates negotiated by health insurers and providers, in settling payment disputes under the No Surprises Act.

The Biden administration issued a new final rule in August in response to Kernodle’s earlier decision against the dispute resolution process.

Provider Groups Coalesce

The Georgia College of Emergency Physicians also recently ended their Georgia-based case, Keith said. And the Association of Air Medical Services, which has a separate lawsuit against the administration’s rule, said in a recent hearing in the US District Court for the District of Columbia that it might challenge the final rule “somewhere else,” which could be in Texas, Keith said.

The Physician Advocacy Institute Inc. “strongly supports the Texas Medical Association in their latest lawsuit challenging federal regulatory agencies’ flawed approach to resolving disputes between physicians and insurers under the No Surprises Act, which President Biden signed into law last year.” according to a statement issued Monday from the group’s CEO, Kelly Kenney. PAI has affiliated state medical associations representing more than 170,000 physicians and medical students.

If Kernodle, the Texas judge, rules against the most recent rule on how payment disputes should be decided, “You would lose the guardrails on the arbitration process,” Keith said. “It runs the risk that IDR would become more inflationary,” and “that out-of-network providers further use arbitration to get higher out-of-network prices,” she said.

There should be incentives for insurers and providers to work out rates through negotiation, with dispute resolution being used as a back-up, Keith said. The danger is IDR could be used “to garner higher out-of-network reimbursements, even when the circumstances don’t warrant it.”

The Department of Labor reported in August that disputing parties had more than 46,000 initial disputes through the federal independent dispute resolution portal, substantially more than what federal agencies had expected for an entire year.

The case is Tex. Med. Ass’n. v. Dep’t of Health and Human Serv., E.D. Tex., No. 6:22-cv-00372, 9/22/22.

To contact the reporter on this story: Sara Hansard in Washington at shansard@bloomberglaw.com

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Cheryl Saenz at csaenz@bloombergindustry.com; Karl Hardy at khardy@bloomberglaw.com

Surprise Medical Bill Rule Lawsuit Heading Toward Texas Court (bloomberglaw.com)

Record number of rural hospital closures in 2020 highlights the financial, workforce shortage and patient volume challenges they face

WASHINGTON, D.C. (September 8, 2022) –— The American Hospital Association today released a new report highlighting the variety of causes that resulted in 136 rural hospital closures from 2010 to 2021, and a record 19 closures in 2020 alone. These include many longstanding pressures, such as low reimbursement, staffing shortages, low patient volume and regulatory barriers, as well as the continued financial challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, expenses for labor, drugs, supplies and equipment have also increased dramatically, ultimately causing difficulties in maintaining access to care for people in rural communities.

“While many hospitals and health systems are facing unprecedented challenges, those faced in rural America are unique,” said AHA President and CEO Rick Pollack. “We must ensure that hospitals have the support and flexibility they need to continue to be providers of critical services and access points for patients and communities.”

View videos from Julie Yaroch, D.O., president of ProMedica Charles and Virginia Hickman Hospital in Adrian, Mich., and Sean Fadale, president and CEO of Nathan Littauer Hospital and Nursing Home in Gloversville, N.Y., describing the current challenges facing rural hospitals and what Congress can do to provide these hospitals additional support.

Rural hospitals and health systems make up about 35% of all hospitals across the country and include critical access hospitals (no more than 25 acute care beds and more than 35 miles from the nearest hospital), frontier hospitals (six or fewer residents per square mile) and sole community hospitals (hospitals for Medicare beneficiaries in isolated communities), among other Medicare designations. Rural hospitals are major economic drivers, supporting one in every 12 rural jobs in the U.S. and contributing $220 billion in economic activity in their communities in 2020.

Despite facing ongoing challenges, a number of pathways exist for rural hospitals’ financial sustainability. In addition to policy solutions aimed at specific challenges to support rural hospitals in maintaining access to care for their communities, other approaches include flexible models of care, decreased regulatory burden, various partnership arrangements and state Medicaid expansion.

Importantly, the Medicare-dependent Hospital (MDH) and enhanced Low-volume Adjustment (LVA) programs provide vital support to rural hospitals to offset financial vulnerabilities associated with being geographically isolated and having low patient volumes. However, both of these critical programs are scheduled to expire on Sept. 30, 2022, without further action from Congress.

The AHA urges Congress to extend the MDH and LVA programs (Rural Hospital Support Act, S.4009, and Assistance for Rural Community Hospitals Act, H.R.8747) to allow rural hospitals to continue serving their local communities during this unprecedented time of sustained financial pressure and historic changes in care delivery.

A full copy of today’s report can be found on the AHA website here.

New AHA Report Finds Rural Hospital Closures Threaten Patient Access to Care as Hospitals Face a Range of Rising Pressures | AHA

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About the American Hospital Association
The American Hospital Association (AHA) is a not-for-profit association of health care provider organizations and individuals that are committed to the health improvement of their communities. The AHA advocates on behalf of our nearly 5,000 member hospitals, health systems and other health care organizations, our clinician partners – including more than 270,000 affiliated physicians, 2 million nurses and other caregivers – and the 43,000 health care leaders who belong to our professional membership groups. Founded in 1898, the AHA provides insight and education for health care leaders and is a source of information on health care issues and trends. For more information, visit the AHA website at www.aha.org.

Erica Carbajal 

Health officials in Harris County, Texas, said a resident with various severe illnesses who was also presumed to be positive for monkeypox died Aug. 28 at a local hospital. 

The official cause of death is unknown, and an autopsy report is expected in a few weeks, according to health officials. The Harris County health department said it is working with the CDC and state health department to determine whether monkeypox may have played a role in the person’s death. It’s unclear what other “various severe illnesses” the person had. 

“We are sharing this information to err on the side of transparency and to avoid potential misinformation about his case,” said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo. 

Three more updates on the nation’s monkeypox outbreak: 

1. U.S. cases have surpassed 18,000, CDC data shows. Several major U.S. cities have seen early signs that the outbreak may be peaking. During an update on Aug. 26, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, MD, said while nationwide cases are still rising week over week, the rate at which they’re rising appears to be slowing. “We’re watching this with cautious optimism, and really hopeful that many of our harm-reduction messages and our vaccines are getting out there and working,” she said. 

2. HHS is investing $11 million to support production of the Jynneos monkeypox vaccine. The funds will support the nation’s first “fill and finish” facility in Grand Rapids, Mich. Grand River Aseptic Manufacturing plant will put the product from the manufacturer, Bavarian Nordic, into 2.5 million vials. 

3. Physicians are seeing a broad presentation of monkeypox symptoms among patients, The New York Times reported Aug. 26. Physicians told the news outlet they have seen infected patients who don’t ever develop a rash characteristic of the disease, patients with pox or lesions as their only symptom, as well as cases where patients experience confusion and seizures. And some patients have had lesions that look more like mosquito bites or ingrown hairs rather than the large pustules typical of the infection. 

Texas health officials investigate US’ 1st possible monkeypox death: 4 updates (beckershospitalreview.com)

Andrew Cass 

Kaufman Hall experts said that 2022 is shaping up to be the worst year financially for U.S. hospitals and health systems since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Hospitals and health systems saw decreases in outpatient revenue and operating room time and increases in inpatient lengths of stay from June to July, according to Kaufman Hall’s most recent “National Hospital Flash Report” released Aug. 29. 

“Although hospitals saw gradual improvement in recent months, July reversed any gains hospitals saw this year,” the report stated. 

The report stated that hospitals are experiencing some of the worst margins since the start of the pandemic, but “they lack the federal funds to offset the damage.”

Hospitals hired more aggressively in July, but labor was still in high demand and prices rose accordingly, according to the report. Sicker patients also stayed in the hospital longer, driving up costs.

The report also stated that an increasing number of patients continue to choose ambulatory centers over hospital settings for surgical procedures, which is a “sign of a larger shift to ambulatory care and new ways of accessing care outside of the hospital.” 

Kaufman Hall Senior Vice President of Data and Analytics Erik Swanson said, “2022 has been, and will likely continue to be, a challenging year for hospitals and health systems, but it would not be prudent to focus on short-term solutions at the expense of long-term planning.”

“Hospitals and health systems must think strategically and make investments to strengthen performance toward long-term institutional goals despite the day-to-day financial challenges they experience,” he said. 

Read the full report here. 

Hospitals experiencing some of the worst margins since beginning of pandemic: Kaufman Hall (beckershospitalreview.com)

August 22, 2022 – Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (NYSE: TMO), the world leader in serving science, today opened its largest single-use technology manufacturing site in Greater Nashville. The $105 million, 400,000-square-foot facility enables the company to help meet rapidly growing demand for the bioprocessing materials needed to produce vaccines and breakthrough therapies for cancer and other diseases. This new site is part of Thermo Fisher’s $650 million multi-year investment to expand its bioprocessing production capabilities.  

“Customers depend on our best-in-class technologies, services and expertise. This continued investment in bioprocessing manufacturing allows us to better serve them in delivering greater supply through scalable solutions,” said Daniella Cramp, senior vice president and president, bioproduction, Thermo Fisher Scientific. “As the largest single-use manufacturing site in Thermo Fisher’s network and one of the largest in the world, the Lebanon facility near Nashville enables customers to bring medicines to patients faster than ever before.”   

The Lebanon facility will manufacture customizable, single-use BioProcess Containers and fluid transfer assembly systems that are in high demand by biopharma companies. The completed site will include 92,000 square-feet of clean room and will also include a dedicated line for the recently released Thermo Scientific DynaDrive™ Bioreactor. The site location is bringing critical materials closer to biopharma customers in the region, with Nashville among the top ten fastest-growing biotech hubs in the U.S.1  

The Lebanon site currently employs approximately 300 people, and the completed facility will create 1,400 new jobs in roles across engineering, procurement, quality, warehousing, site leadership and more. This site is part of Thermo Fisher’s global bioprocessing supply network that expands across 100 countries to help ensure critical medicines reach patients. The Thermo Fisher network of sites have enabled more than 12 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses and partnered with customers to supply its technology and materials for many currently approved COVID vaccines and therapeutics.  

Learn More 

ANALYSIS  |  BY AMANDA SCHIAVO  |   AUGUST 01, 2022

Expenses are still weighing heavily on hospitals, health systems, and physician’s practices as the cost of care continues to rise.

Hospitals, health systems, and physician’s practices are still struggling under the weight of significant financial pressure, that the rise in patient volume and revenue can’t seem to outweigh.

The increase in patient volume and revenue has not been able to offset the historically high operating margins these organizations are facing, according to data from Kaufman Hall’s National Hospital Flash Report and Physician Flash Report. Hospitals, health systems, and physician’s practices dealt with negative margins in June for the sixth consecutive month this year.

“To say that 2022 has challenged healthcare providers is an understatement,” Erik Swanson, a senior vice president of data and analytics with Kaufman Hall, said in an email report. “It’s unlikely that hospitals and health systems can undo the damage caused by the COVID-19 waves of earlier this year, especially with material and labor costs at record highs this summer.”

The median Kaufman Hall year-to-date operating margin index for hospitals was -0.09% through June, for the sixth month of cumulative negative actual operating margins. However, the median change in operating margin in June was up 30.8% compared to May, but down 49.3% from June 2021.

Hospital revenues for June continued to trend upward, even as volumes evened out, according to the Kauffman Hall data. Organizations saw a 2.1% drop in patient length of stay. Both patient days and emergency department visits each dropped by 2.6% in June when compared to May. Hospital’s gross operating revenue was up 1.2% in June from May.

Expenses have been dragging down hospital margins for months, however, June saw a slight month-over-month improvement as total hospital expenses dropped 1.3%, despite this, year-over-year expenses are still up 7.5% from June 2021. Physician practices saw a drop in provider compensation, according to the Kaufman Hall data, however, this wasn’t enough to offset expenses. The competitive labor market for healthcare support staff resulted in a new high for total direct expense per provider FTE in Q2 2022 of $619,682—up 7% from the second quarter of 2021 and 12% from the second quarter of 2020.

“Given the trends in the data, physician practices need to focus on efficiency in the second half of 2022,” Matthew Bates, managing director and Physician Enterprise service line lead with Kaufman Hall, said in the email report. “Amid historically high expenses, shifting some services away from physicians to advanced practice providers like nurse practitioners or physician assistants could help rein in the costs of treating an increased patient load while taking some of the weight off the shoulders of physicians.”

Amanda Schiavo is the Finance Editor for HealthLeaders.

The American Heart Association will provide 700 rural hospitals with resources to promote consistent, timely evidence-based care

DALLAS, July 26, 2022 — A new three-year initiative by the American Heart Association® aims to eliminate rural health disparities by helping hospitals and clinicians provide high-quality, consistent, timely and appropriate evidence-based care.

People who live in rural communities live an average of three years fewer than urban counterparts and have a 40% higher likelihood of developing heart disease (14.2%) compared with their counterparts in small metropolitan (11.2%) and urban (9.9%) areas, a gap that has grown over the past decade.[1] Additionally, rural communities face a critical shortage of health care professionals, including public health workers, which negatively impacts care. This leaves many people vulnerable to increased morbidity and mortality that could be prevented with appropriate identification and treatment.

The American Heart Association, the world’s leading nonprofit organization focused on heart and brain health for all, is launching its Rural Health Care Outcomes Accelerator to provide up to 700 rural hospitals with no-cost access to Get With The Guidelines® quality programs for coronary artery disease, heart failure and stroke. In addition, the American Heart Association will launch a rural recognition program for these hospitals to assist in communicating their commitment to care excellence with the communities they serve.

“Patients and health care professionals in rural areas face unique challenges and opportunities — this project aims to improve equitable cardiovascular care for all Americans, regardless of where they live,” said Karen E. Joynt Maddox, MD, MPH, volunteer expert for the American Heart Association, co-author on “Call to Action: Rural Health: A Presidential Advisory From the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association” and co-director of the Center for Health Economics and Policy at the Institute for Public Health at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

The Association will convene rural clinical experts and leaders over three years to develop and publish rural quality and outcomes research. Participating hospitals also will have access to professional education, an online rural community network that encourages peer-to-peer connection and provides resources to support model practice sharing, and collaborative innovation.

“This new initiative will help ensure all Americans living in rural areas have the best possible chance of survival and the highest quality of life attainable,” said Tim Putnam DHA, MBA, EMT, FACHE, volunteer expert for the American Heart Association, past president of the National Rural Health Association (NRHA) and former CEO of Mary Margaret Mary Health in Batesville, Indiana.

Addressing the unique health needs of people in rural America is critical to achieving the American Heart Association’s 2030 impact goal for equitably increasing healthy life expectancy nationwide. Innovative approaches like this are key to improving rural health across the nation.

Visit the Rural Health Care Outcomes Accelerator project website to learn more. Interested hospitals can sign up online to receive more information.

Additional Resources:

• 2020 Rural Health Presidential Advisory
• Press release – Public Health AmeriCorps to address health inequity in rural communities
• Press release – $9.3 million investment to expand rural health and stroke care

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About the American Heart Association

The American Heart Association is a relentless force for a world of longer, healthier lives. We are dedicated to ensuring equitable health in all communities. Through collaboration with numerous organizations, and powered by millions of volunteers, we fund innovative research, advocate for the public’s health and share lifesaving resources. The Dallas-based organization has been a leading source of health information for nearly a century. Connect with us on heart.org, Facebook, Twitter or by calling 1-800-AHA-USA1.  

For Media Inquiries: 214-706-1173

Michelle Rosenfeld: 214-706-1099; michelle.rosenfeld@heart.org

For Public Inquiries: 1-800-AHA-USA1 (242-8721)

heart.org and stroke.org

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[1] American Heart Association issues call to action for addressing inequities in rural health. February 10, 2020. https://newsroom.heart.org/news/american-heart-association-issues-call-to-action-for-addressing-inequities-in-rural-health; American Heart Association. Public Health AmeriCorps to address health inequity in rural communities. April 6, 2022. https://newsroom.heart.org/news/public-health-americorps-to-address-health-inequity-in-rural-communities.