The health care of rural citizens throughout the United States will
benefit from a new center that is being formed through a $2 million grant.
UNMC received the four-year grant to form the RUPRI (Rural Policy Research
Institute) Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis. The new center will
build upon the work of the RUPRI Rural Health Panel, a group of health-policy
experts from across the country that advises federal legislators on rural
health. The RUPRI Rural Health Panel, formed in 1993 to analyze health
reform proposals, will have a primary role in disseminating policy briefs
and papers from the new center to federal policymakers.
The center will build upon our track record of providing federal policymakers
with timely, important information about how current and proposed health
policies affect people in rural communities, said Keith Mueller, M.D.,
the centers director and chairman of the Rural Health Panel.
The center, located at UNMC in the department of preventive and societal
medicine, will analyze the effects of new policies and programs on the
health and well-being of rural people. The federal Office of Rural
Health Policy, in collaboration with the center, will decide on the specific
policy questions to be answered through the centers work. However,
several of the centers proposed projects will analyze how changes in Medicare
policy affect delivery of health-care services in rural areas, and on the
ability of rural Medicare beneficiaries to access needed services. The
center also will look at how information networking technology can be used
to sustain rural health-care systems.
The centers staff includes Dr. Mueller; Joan Penrod, Ph.D., a health
services researcher with expertise in rural elderly; Alan Diener, Ph.D.,
a health economist; and Li-Wu Chen, Ph.D., a health-care administration
researcher. Analytic support for the work of the center will be provided
by five health data analysts from the section for health services research
at UNMC.
The RUPRI Rural Health Panel will work closely with the new center.
Panelists include economists, health-care professionals, and health services
researchers from Maine, Virginia, Minnesota, North Carolina, Missouri and
North Dakota.