On September 15, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released application materials for the Rural Health Transformation Program, a $50 billion nationwide investment in rural health authorized in the 2025 budget reconciliation law.
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced October 1 that Arkansas will participate in the program and launched a portal to accept proposals from stakeholders. Submissions must be received by noon on October 10. In the announcement, Sanders said the portal will provide “the information we need to compete for this funding effectively.
The program will allot funding in two $25 billion tranches. One tranche will consist of at least $100 million allotted annually for five years to each approved state, and the other will be allotted according to a points-based “workload funding factors” scoring system. Scores will be based on rural facility and population measures along with other measures, such as implementation of certain initiatives and state policies targeting CMS priorities. Details of the program, including the scoring methodology, are discussed in our explainer.
ACHI has a variety of online data resources that could be leveraged in Arkansas’s application to demonstrate the challenges experienced in rural Arkansas and measure the impact of investments:
This dashboard includes data on Arkansas’s primary care physician workforce for the years 2019 through 2022. It provides visualizations at the state, county, and regional levels and includes information on PCP demographics, activity status (full-time, part-time), payer mix, and primary care subspecialties such as family medicine, internal medicine, general practice, pediatrics, and geriatrics.
This dashboard includes data on Arkansas’s OB-GYN workforce for the years 2019 through 2022. It provides visualizations at the state, county, and regional levels and includes information on OB-GYN demographics and activity status (full-time, part-time), and payer mix.
This dashboard makes data on expenditures for medical, pharmacy, and dental services in the state available for the years 2021 through 2023. It includes expenditures by public and private insurers as well as insured individuals’ out-of-pocket expenditures.
This dashboard is one component of a larger analysis of body mass index (BMI) data in Arkansas public schools. It includes district- and school-level data on students’ BMI measurements for school years 2019-20 through 2023-24.
In addition to these resources, useful information can be found on our Rural Health Insights topic page, our blog, and numerous explainers, infographics, and other dashboards.
