Essential hospitals play an indispensable role in keeping all Americans, including rural Americans, healthy. To ensure health care access in rural communities, essential hospitals are building integrated systems of care that meet patients where they are and training health care providers to ensure all patients have access to the care that they need.
In 2022, the 335 member hospitals of America’s Essential Hospitals were part of 108 systems of care that aim to meet a range of needs in their local communities, including specialized tertiary care, expansive ambulatory care networks, robust physician training, and interventions to boost economic health. Essential hospitals provide these services to patients in every type of community. In 2022, 29 percent of essential hospitals were located in rural areas, and an additional 35 percent of essential hospitals were located in urban areas but had hospital-affiliated clinics in rural areas.
Essential hospitals use many strategies to provide access to the full continuum of care and meet patients wherever they are. By training the next generation of the health care workforce, providing telehealth and teleconsultation services, and, in some cases, even deploying their workforce to nonaffiliated care settings, essential hospitals are increasing access to care for patients in rural, remote, and isolated communities. This brief explores those strategies and features case studies from essential hospitals UK HealthCare, in Lexington, Ky.; Spartanburg Medical Center, in Spartanburg, S.C.; and UNM Health System, in Albuquerque, N.M.
To learn more about Spartanburg’s rural health care efforts, listen to the March 2025 episode of the association’s Health Policy Essentials podcast.
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