Rural healthcare in Colorado is getting a much-needed financial infusion of about $170 million dollars in federal grants.
Gov. Jared Polis announced winners of funding from the Rural Health Transformation Program at an event Monday in Blackhawk.
A total of 91 applicants and 250 projects won grants in a competitive process. The new funds will back efforts from sustaining the health workforce to expanding care for substance use disorder to strengthening EMS and emergency care.
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Simon Smith, the CEO of Clinica Family Health and Wellness in Blackhawk, said the nearly $500,0000 grant it won will help it expand telehealth services.
“We’re going to be able to look towards the future, new technology investments, other things that we don’t always have resources to free up to sort of look towards the future,” he said.
Issues of access
He said before the clinic opened in Gilpin County four years ago, it was one of the only counties in the state with no primary care access.
“Local quality of life surveys identified a lack of access to healthcare as one of the primary reasons a resident would choose to leave this beautiful place,” Smith said. “With this grant, Clinica will look to build upon the success of the past four years, seeking to ensure a sustainable healthcare resource in Gilpin County for years to come.”
He said the clinic was working to invest in a new electronic health record system, which he said would allow it to create more access via telehealth.
“One of the challenges here is we have an incredible workforce, but recruiting workforce to local communities is really, really difficult in rural and frontier counties,” Smith said. “Being able to use technology to get more access to specialty care delivered locally is a big piece.”
“There’s no dental or oral health services here. There’s no pharmacy here. There’s very limited behavioral healthcare services here,” he said of the community west of Golden, 20 miles up a windy mountain road, or 30 minutes away.
“Before we opened, there was only EMS and there’s an amazing EMS program here, but that’s not the backbone of a healthcare system.”
Federal cuts in place
The money comes as rural providers deal with deep cuts to Medicaid and other health funding, much of that coming through the passage last summer by Congressional Republicans of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, also known as H.R. 1.
“There’s lots of different things going on in healthcare, some good, some bad. HR1 as a whole, two steps backward, one step forward,” said Polis. “We’re certainly celebrating today, these grantees. I’m confident this will be transformational in some of these areas.”
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Michelle Mills, CEO of the Colorado Rural Health Center, said the funds are coming at a critical time, with so much federal health funding shrinking.
“I do think this will help for sure with innovation and trying to expand services where folks didn’t have funding to do that,” she said.
Mills noted the healthcare landscape is changing thanks to both federal and state cuts and health providers are trying to stay resilient.
“I think people are nervous,” she said. “I mean, they’re excited to get these funds to expand to do new things, but also nervous not knowing what is really going to come next year and what types of uninsured numbers we may be seeing.”
Improving health outcomes
The funds aim to both protect access to care and also improve health outcomes for people living in the state’s rural and frontier communities.
“We prioritized funding safety net programs, so federally qualified health centers, mental health centers that are comprehensive, and then, of course, our critical access hospitals and our rural hospitals,” said Deputy Medicaid Director Cristen Bates.
She said the hope is the money helps rural providers ease the impact of the cuts on people and communities who rely on government health programs.
“It’s really important because they’re going to be impacted more than a lot of others with the need for uncompensated care,” Bates said. “As the number of people on Medicaid go down, they’re going to have to still keep serving them. So they need these tools more than ever to help build sustainable programs in light of those pressures.”
The grant program is set to run for five years. The funding comes from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
