Creating a Rural and Frontier Hospital Strategy for Colorado

Keywords

Types of Research

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Policy-Focused

Summary

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Colorado’s rural and frontier hospitals face substantial challenges, including ensuring financial viability, serving geographically isolated populations, and stimulating the local economy. The goal of the Colorado Rural Futures project is to create an evidence-based policy roadmap informed by a mixed-methods study to strengthen these facilities and catalyze needed change at the state level.

Aim 1, through an environmental scan, captured major themes from the literature about the underlying causes of rural hospital vulnerability. Aim 2, via quantitative analysis, identified core services delivered by rural and frontier hospitals and assessed where patients in rural communities go for essential services when local hospital care is not available. Aim 3 involves key informant interviews and focus groups with the goal of generating specific policy recommendations and determining the acceptability, feasibility, and prioritization of each.    

Significance

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A comprehensive policy roadmap to inform advocacy efforts to strengthen rural and frontier hospitals could focus and catalyze statewide policy change.

Impact

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Translational Science Benefits Model* Benefits
Demonstrated: Benefits are those that have been observed and verifiable. Potential: Benefits are those logically expected with moderate to high confidence
Increased ability to provide care to all.  Potential		Health Care Accessibility
Adaptation or creation of policies to improve current conditions and provide optimal care. Potential		Policies
Delivery of evidence for needed change with rural and frontier hospitals from various sources to improve their current conditions. Potential		Scientific Research Reports

*The Translational Science Benefits Model is a framework designed to help public health and clinical scientists demonstrate the impact of their work in the real world. The Translational Science Benefits Model and Translating for Impact Toolkit © 2017-2023, created by the Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and available at translationalsciencebenefitsmodel.wustl.edu, is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). 

Health Equity Implications

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The goals of creating a rural and frontier hospital policy roadmap are to better understand the challenges these institutions face and to recommend specific policy proposals designed to improve their conditions. 

Lessons Learned

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To develop focused state-level strategies, it’s meaningful to employ a mixed-methods approach and essential to involve the impacted hospitals and other rural health stakeholders, as they provide critical insight to inform policy change.