Maine Receives More Than $500,000 to Improve Healthcare in Rural Parts of the State

The Maine Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has been awarded more than $500,000 to help improve healthcare in rural parts of the state.

Awarded through the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility Program (FLEX), this grant is designed to help Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) make “quality improvement[s]” and establish or expand emergency medical services in rural parts of the country.

The CAH designation was first created in 1997 in the wake of more than four hundred rural hospital closures throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is responsible for assigning this designation to eligible rural hospitals nationwide.

Maine has sixteen CAHs throughout the state, including in Blue Hill, Greenville, Bar Harbor, and Damariscotta, among others.

The FLEX Monitoring Team — which represents “a consortium of researchers” from the Universities of Minnesota, North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Southern Maine and is funded by the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy — reports that Franklin Memorial Hospital in Farmington is the most recent recipient of a CAH designation in the state, officially joining the list in April of this year.

The FLEX program is funded through the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), which is responsible for providing “equitable health care to the nation’s highest-need communities.”

In addition to improving health care in rural America, the HRSA also has programs that aid “people with low incomes, people with HIV, pregnant people, children, parents, transplant patients, and the health workforce.”

More than 1,900 rural counties and municipalities nationwide have received support through HRSA initiatives.

According to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Rural Hospital Flexibility Program focuses on improvements in three core areas:

• “Hospital Performance and the Quality of Care;
• Financial and Operational Performance; and
• Encouraging health system development through the engagement of the rural community with CAHs and other care providers, and integrating rural Emergency Medical Services (EMS) into the health care system while assuring the quality of services provided.”

“As one of the most rural states in the nation, Maine people already face many challenges when accessing affordable, quality healthcare,” Sens. Susan Collins (R) and Angus King (I) said in a joint statement.

“This grant will help our rural healthcare systems provide better care, and work to ensure we do not lose these critical facilities and services to preventable closures,” they continued.

“We welcome this funding and are grateful for the continued federal support to help keep Maine people safe and healthy,” Sens. Collins and King wrote. “By investing in the health and well-being of our rural communities, we are making an investment in the future of Maine.”

Click Here to Read the Senators’ Full Press Release

Additional details concerning the specific distribution of these funds do not yet appear to be publicly available.