HHS Releases Plan to Improve Rural Health Focuses on Better Broadband, Telehealth Services

The Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) released the Rural Action Plan, the first HHS-wide assessment of rural healthcare efforts in more than 18 years and the product of HHS’s Rural Task Force, a group of experts and leaders across the department first put together by Secretary Alex Azar in 2019. The plan lays out a four-point strategy to transform rural health and human services, with a number of actions that can be launched within weeks or months. Leveraging tech and innovation was one of the strategies, which includes:

• Supporting a new HHS Health Challenge to leverage technology to improve screening and management of post-partum depression for rural women.
• Providing more than $8 million in grant funding for the Telehealth Network Grant Program to provide emergency care consults via telehealth to rural providers without emergency care specialists.
• Developing new flexibility for Medicare Advantage (MA) plans to improve access to managed care options in rural areas through changes in network adequacy assessments for MA plans and to take into account the impact of telehealth providers in contracted networks.

Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior counselor to the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, said there are multiple challenges with implementing telehealth across the nation. Many initiatives for robust telehealth programs need fast bandwidth, yet getting the money and setting up the necessary infrastructure is very difficult, he said. “It will be a long time before this kind of technology will be readily available to much of the country,” he said.