Every state has a State Office of Rural Health (SORH), and most states also have a separate state rural health association. They are different organizations doing different jobs, and a rural facility usually needs both. The directory below lists each of them for all 50 states.
The State Office of Rural Health is a government office. In most states it administers the Small Rural Hospital Improvement Program (SHIP), supports the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility (Flex) Program for Critical Access Hospitals, distributes state level funding opportunities that never appear on Grants.gov, and is frequently the practical point of contact for Rural Health Transformation Program questions. The state rural health association is a membership organization. It is where peer conversations happen, where other facilities compare vendors and approaches, and where policy advocacy gets organized.
For IT and technology staff specifically, these offices are chronically underused, largely because they sit on the administrative side of the house and nobody forwards the emails. That is a missed opportunity. SHIP funds hardware, software, and training. The people staffing these offices spend most of their time trying to give money away to organizations that never ask.
What to ask when you call
- What programs is our facility eligible for in the current program year?
- What counts as an allowable SHIP investment this year, and when is the deadline?
- Who administers our state's Rural Health Transformation Program subawards, and where is the plan published?
- Are there state level funding opportunities we would not find on Grants.gov?
- Which other facilities in the state have solved the problem we are working on?
