Center for Economic Analysis of Rural Health

The goal of CEARH is to build capacity for local leaders to ensure the sustainability of the rural health economy and continued access to quality healthcare for rural communities. Objective 1: Respond to pressing issues facing rural communities identified through HRSA’s Office of Rural Health Policy, the CEARH advisory council, and other partners. Objective 2: Create timely, relevant, and useful research-based tools that health care leaders, elected officials, economic development professionals, and community leaders can utilize to sustain their rural health economy. Objective 3: Provide face-to-face and online trainings and workshops as well as widely disseminate resources nationally through CEARH’s advisory council, rural health conferences and rural health online repositories. The NRHEAC will serve as a comprehensive resource to accurately estimate the importance of the local healthcare system by utilizing multiple methods and exploring aspects of the entire healthcare system. We will do this by building on and expanding existing research efforts as well as developing new tools and resources to help healthcare leaders, locally elected officials, economic development professionals and other community leaders understand and support the sustainability of the local healthcare system. The CEARH team is comprised largely of faculty and staff from the Community and Economic Development Initiative of Kentucky (CEDIK) at the University of Kentucky and Oklahoma State University. The proposed CEARH team has extensive rural health expertise, both research capacity as well as the ability to create tools and resources and deliver trainings, for rural health leaders and their stakeholders. The CEARH Advisory Council will provide input to the development of research and trainings, a careful review of documents, and dissemination of materials and training opportunities for rural stakeholders. The advisory members reflect diverse rural stakeholders including hospital, clinic, and EMS leaders, health coalitions, and economic development professionals and elected officials. Furthermore, the Rural Health Leadership Radio is designed specifically for rural listeners and the Rural Blog is a national, daily dissemination tool for rural stakeholders with a particular emphasis on the rural media