Reimagining Care Delivery for Rural Communities

Rural communities often face persistent barriers to healthcare access, including provider shortages, long travel distances, limited behavioral health services, and challenges coordinating care across providers and systems. Innovative care models can help address these challenges by supporting more integrated, flexible, and patient-centered services by expanding access through technology.

“Innovative care models are designed to improve patient outcomes while creating greater efficiency across the healthcare system,” said Westat’s Dominick Esposito, PhD, Vice President. “As technology evolves, healthcare organizations have new opportunities to expand access, strengthen care coordination, and deliver patient-centered services to rural communities through more flexible models of care.”

Strategies for Transformation

Westat has extensive experience supporting the design and implementation of innovative healthcare strategies that address the needs of rural and underserved communities. In one healthcare system transformation initiative, we brought together providers, behavioral health organizations, and Medicaid managed care organizations (MCOs) to identify innovative strategies to improve care coordination, integrate behavioral health and primary care, leverage telehealth options, and expand access to treatment. This effort aimed to improve population health, enhance the patient experience, and support more efficient use of resources through healthcare system transformation.

As part of this work, Westat helped develop recommendations for integrating behavioral health and primary care, an approach that can improve outcomes and create a more coordinated patient experience. “Westat has found that coordination across providers who are already overworked and under-resourced is critical in rural areas,” said Meg Tucker, Principal Research Associate, Healthcare Quality. “Through integrated mixed-methods approaches, our teams can identify the most successful strategies, as well as the conditions necessary for that success to happen, ultimately elevating the voices of rural communities.”

A Focus on Solutions

Recognizing the challenges of serving predominantly rural populations, Westat also helped design telehealth strategies to address behavioral health needs and workforce shortages. These recommendations included expanding access to medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder and increasing the availability of specialized services in underserved communities. Westat’s research also explores how integrating care across specialists, whose services are already stretched thin in rural areas, reduces workload.

By helping states explore practical, evidence-based solutions, Westat supports healthcare systems to be more connected, accessible, and responsive to the needs of rural populations. “Stakeholders in rural communities are being inundated with solutions to their challenges from every angle. A plan to carefully assess which proposed solutions will really work for each community is a necessary step to ensure scarce resources get to communities and are used effectively to benefit patients,” said Esposito.