In August 2024, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Center for Medicare and Medication Innovation (“Innovation Center”) hosted the 2024 Rural Health Hackathon – a series of in-person, collaborative sessions designed to generate and construct creative and actionable ideas to address rural health challenges. The 2024 Hackathon built on CMS’ extensive outreach to rural communities through site visits and listening sessions to better understand rural health care issues. Through these solution-oriented events, the CMS Innovation Center brought together rural health community care providers, community organizations, industry and tech entrepreneurs, funders, policy experts, and beneficiaries to leverage the wisdom and experience of the crowd. Hackathon attendees generated new ideas to address some of the top challenges impacting health care in rural health settings and drive action to improve clinical outcomes, increase access, and better care experience for both patients and providers in rural communities.
Interested parties had two ways to participate:
- In-Person Sessions focused on three areas as they relate to rural communities: Access to Care, Care Delivery Model, and Workforce. Participants were be placed into multi-disciplinary teams and asked to generate and develop solutions that address one or more of the following challenge questions:
- What novel rural health programs exist and could be scaled? How could existing rural health programs and policies work better, including changes to regulatory policies and requirements?
- What are new, actionable, and creative ideas to address emerging rural health challenges?
- Locations for the In-Person Sessions were:
- Bozeman, Montana: August 14, 2024
- Dallas, Texas: August 22, 2024
- Wilson, North Carolina: August 29, 2024
Virtually: Organizations and individuals across all 50 states and US territories were invited to submit virtual concepts.
The virtual submission process generated additional concepts to address the same three challenge areas that attendees discussed during the in-person events: Access to Care, Care Delivery Model, and Workforce.
Top ideas with greatest opportunity for action are highlighted in a public CMS Innovation Center report: Re-imagining Rural Health: Themes, Concepts, and Next Steps from the CMS Innovation Center “Hackathon” Series (PDF).
Challenge: Improving Health Care in Rural Communities
Expanding access to high-quality, affordable health care and addressing the unique needs and challenges experienced by rural communities remains a top strategic priority for CMS. An estimated 67 million Americans live in areas identified as rural, Tribal, frontier, and geographically isolated territories. These populations continue to face structural barriers to achieving equitable health outcomes, such as access to specialists and home and community-based services, long distances to travel for care, and recruitment and retention of physicians and other health professionals. These challenges are exacerbated by payment structures that rely on volume, regulatory hurdles or barriers, and limited coverage options.
In recent years, the CMS Innovation Center has tested ideas to address rural health challenges and opportunities through previous and ongoing models, including the Community Health Access and Rural Transformation Model, the Pennsylvania Rural Health Model, the Rural Community Hospital Demonstrations, and the Frontier Community Health Integration Project. While progress has been made, there are persistent challenges in rural health communities that the CMS Innovation Center seeks to address through future models or initiatives.
Designing sustainable solutions requires input from individuals and organizations across the rural health space, including provider organizations, health centers, Rural Health Clinics, critical access hospitals, and community-based organizations doing the work on the ground, as well as the beneficiaries they serve. The CMS Innovation Center seeks to use input from the Rural Health Hackathon to both design new programs and improve and scale existing programs already operating in rural contexts.
This event was authorized under section 1115A of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1315a), which created the Innovation Center within CMS. CMS reserves the right to change or update this notice at any time.
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