View of Vicksburg, Mississippi
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Mississippi's Rural Health Transformation Program is a strategic response to a precarious financial landscape where $206 million in initial grants must offset nearly $160 million in projected annual federal healthcare cuts and prevent vulnerable rural hospitals from closing.
Central pillars of the state's plan to spend federal RHTP dollars are the expansion of telehealth and the strategic integration of artificial intelligence to maximize a limited workforce.
By combining financial incentives with a digital transformation initiative, the state hopes to ensure a permanent, self-sufficient rural healthcare ecosystem.
Here, we take a closer look at what healthcare leaders in the state are concerned about and what they think will be needed to ensure these initiatives work.
Balancing grants and cuts
The state received $206 million for its first year under the $50 billion, five-year program for its plan.
Chad Netterville, executive director of the Mississippi Rural Hospital Alliance, told the Mississippi Business Journal in February that the program was created "because of the deep cuts to healthcare" in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
"That law also steps down the commercial rate benchmark used in Mississippi's Hospital Access Program starting October 1, 2028," Netterville said.
Federal cuts are in addition to disproportionate share hospital cuts that began in October of 2025 and threaten rural hospital profitability.
"Estimates suggest up to $160 million per year could be lost in Mississippi hospital funding once fully phased in," Netterville told MBJ. "Unfortunately, the RHTP funds for Mississippi are not guaranteed to go directly to Mississippi hospitals."
Dr. Jennifer Bryan, who practices family medicine at Hattiesburg Clinic and serves as president of the Mississippi State Medical Association, told Healthcare IT News that rural hospitals in the state need everything from basic physical repairs to high-tech digital expansion.
"We've got rural hospitals that desperately need construction upgrades or have had leaks or plumbing or, you know, crumbling foundational issues," said Bryan.
The state's new BRIDGE Initiative, proposed to be in initial planning and assessment phases under its RHTP plan, states that facility renovations and maintenance that ensure safe and efficient operations to improve healthcare access could potentially receive funding.
As of late March, Bryan said the state had not yet awarded RHTP funding to providers.
"But I do sense a commitment to our state getting access to these dollars, and we are very grateful for the dollars," she said. "We need the dollars."
However, with cuts to the supplemental payment rate hospitals receive under the MHAP, estimates suggest up to $160 million per year could be lost in Mississippi hospital funding once fully phased in.
According to the most recent Chartis Rural Health State of the State report, Mississippi was one of six states estimated to have more than 41% of its rural hospitals vulnerable to closure.
To offset the strain, the state passed a bill allowing rural hospitals to open new services to help them bring in more revenue, such as dialysis centers, by loosening the state's certificate of need requirements, according to a report earlier this year in Mississippi Today.
Expanding telehealth with more than funding
Bryan credited telehealth innovations in Mississippi for helping to bridge the gap for rural patient access to specialists without leaving their communities and cited the University of Mississippi Medical Center's Telemedicine Center of Excellence as the gold standard.
The center continues to explore what's possible, such as research looking at tele-rehabilitation through AI-driven biomechanical monitoring.
That project is testing the technology's accuracy and usability in capturing key biomechanical data for its potential to improve access to physical rehabilitation in rural communities.
The state's Telehealth Adoption and Provider Support (TAPS) Initiative under the RHTP includes a plan for funding broadband and infrastructure upgrades to enhance rural clinic and community telehealth hubs, as well as equipment, such as the purchase and installation of telehealth carts, cameras, monitors, diagnostic peripherals and secure telehealth platforms.
It also includes school-based telehealth expansion that could integrate telehealth services into schools to increase access to preventive, primary and behavioral healthcare for students.
While Bryan said her state has been successful in increasing broadband access – even on remote gravel roads – true telehealth expansion will require overcoming a significant "learning curve" for patients.
Laying broadband fiber is only half the battle, she said.
The disconnect often happens with patients because not all patients have devices or the digital literacy to transition from a traditional office visit to a virtual one.
"It's about teaching people," she said. "These are intelligent people. They just have never had a need to do that."
Bryan said she believes a hybrid model that pairs digital tools with physical outreach, such as mobile clinics and remote diagnostic tools that can transmit heart sounds or images of eardrums, will be the most successful.
The state's new TAPS program also proposes telehealth education training programs for providers and community outreach to help patients understand and utilize telehealth services effectively.
Being strategic with AI for better returns
Bryan said a challenge for the state's RHTP program will be making strategic technology investments.
She said she cautions against buying "flashy" tech that might be obsolete in a year and instead advocates for sustainable choices.
Her clinic uses AI assistant technology from vendor Suki, which she said she found compelling because it addresses the administrative overload at the heart of the rural healthcare challenge, she told Healthcare IT News last year.
"I was immediately intrigued by its potential, not merely to automate, but genuinely to augment clinical practice," she had said.
Now, Bryan said she is a strong advocate of ambient AI to combat physician burnout and increase patient access.
"We don't have enough healthcare providers per patient," she said. "Again, we hope AI augments that, and we see it already in the return on investment. For me in my life, [it] gave me back about an hour and a half to two hours per day."
For overstretched rural doctors, those saved hours can translate directly into increased capacity to see more patients or focus more attention on patients during encounters, said Bryan.
Two programs could fund AI initiatives under the state's RHTP.
The Coordinated Regional Integrated Systems Initiative's decision support pilot program to guide triage, routing and treatment decisions is for emergency medical service providers.
The Health Technology Advancement and Modernization Initiative would fund technology advancements, including AI tools that support data-driven decision-making, improve care coordination and enhance provider operations.
Bryan said AI's capacity to act as a clinical safety net to catch missed diagnoses and streamline the mental tax of medical coding are two areas that could also yield high ROI for rural healthcare providers.
However, while AI can improve accuracy and catch human errors, it remains an imperfect tool that requires strict professional oversight, she added.
She urges clinicians to treat AI as a collaborator that requires constant validation to prevent automated inaccuracies from "polluting" a patient's medical record.
"Trust, but verify and go back and make sure that they said what you meant for it to say," Bryan said.
Growing rural health workforces with new ideas
Mississippi's RHTP proposal seeks to address critical rural provider shortages through a Workforce Expansion Initiative that suggests aggressive financial incentives, including signing and other bonuses, relocation support and stipends for clinical preceptors.
The incentives are designed to attract medical professionals to work in underserved rural areas and are not unique to Mississippi's RHTP plan.
"This is an easy way to start to think about morphing what has created headwinds in market dynamics for us to really be able to take care of the patients in those rural areas," explained Bruce Greenstein, Louisiana Department of Health secretary, last month at HIMSS26.
Greenstein said Louisiana is establishing a clinician credit program to attract medical professionals to work in its underserved rural areas to transform healthcare.
North Mississippi Health Services said that it saved $2.7 million with a leadership management platform. With it, the rural health system has also reduced employee turnover.
Before implementing the system, there was no place where a leader could get a complete, up-to-date picture of their team and spot meaningful opportunities to engage one-on-one. The provider has since marked three consecutive years of increased employee engagement scores and a national top-quartile ranking.
"By 2025, our employee satisfaction scores placed us in the top quartile nationally among healthcare organizations," Kristen Long, RN, chief nursing executive at the health system's Tupelo location, told Healthcare IT News.
"That's the first time we've ever achieved that distinction," she said.
Mississippi's RHTP plan also proposes to invest heavily in infrastructure and community-based education.
By aligning financial incentives with robust mentorship and early-career outreach, the BRIDGE and TAPS initiatives under the plan focus on training staff for modern care delivery, specifically in telehealth compliance and the deployment of community health workers to bridge rural care gaps.
Simultaneously, the plan proposes to reach into secondary education by partnering with high schools and community colleges to provide workshops and job shadowing, essentially cultivating a homegrown healthcare workforce from underrepresented populations.
The ultimate goal is to recruit and retain 2,150 clinicians and support staff while creating 235 new training positions.
Bryan said with the "ballooning" debt of medical students, she supports the idea of sign-on or retention bonuses to keep doctors in rural areas and exploring ways to graduate safe, informed professionals sooner to reduce the years spent in financial struggle.
"There's a lot of information out there about what it really means to struggle during [medical school]. And then you spend a large portion of the beginning of your career trying to get back above water. And every year that goes by, it's worse," she said.
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
