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Ground Level Blog
Jennifer Vogel

Duluth center connects players in rural health care

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If you ask Terry Hill, executive director of the National Rural Health Resource Center in Duluth, connections--between people, organizations, and information--are key to the survival of rural hospitals and clinics.

"If there is a good model that might be working, we want to publicize that," says Hill, who was raised in tiny Tok Junction, Alaska, where health care options were severely limited. "We want to acquire those good models and examples and transfer them into something that can be shared."

These models might diagram methods for improving care quality, shoring up finances, or implementing electronic health records. Rural providers often operate by narrow margins and with limited staff, adding obstacles to modernization efforts.

"We are the eyes and ears of rural hospitals and rural clinics," Hill says. Through the Center, providers can find ways to help themselves and each other.

The organization began in 1985 as a healthcare consortium, with a grant from the Grand-Rapids-based Blandin Foundation, and morphed into the Minnesota Center for Rural Health and, in 1995, the National Rural Health Resource Center.

Earlier this week, the federally-funded Center held a two-day workshop that drew participants from as far away as Oregon and Arkansas, and a wide range of presenters, including Matt Womble, an emergency medical services specialist from North Carolina, and Jane Gelbmann of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in D.C.

Hill says the role of the Center gets more important with each new health care law that passes, making the system ever more complex. "Every piece of legislation designed for larger hospitals," he says, "almost always has a consequence for rural providers that wasn't intended."

Working in the rural healthcare field, Hill adds, "appeals to my sense of the dramatic. We are the ultimate underdogs."