Andy Zukowski, CFO of Greenville, N.C.-based ECU Health and the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, is tackling healthcare industry uncertainties head on with his finance team as a new year dawns. North Carolina is facing a budget…
Rural Health
In recent years, a swell of states has adopted laws to lessen the requirements for foreign-trained physicians to join the U.S. workforce. The laws aim to combat the nation’s growing physician shortage, which is becoming more urgent as patient acuity…
Rural hospital leaders are raising concerns that some of the new federal rural health transformation funding could flow through state governments without ever reaching the hospitals the program was designed to support. CMS awarded $50 billion across all 50 states…
States are beginning to sketch out plans to deploy billions of dollars in new federal funding aimed at stabilizing and transforming rural healthcare, but early signals point to wide variation in approach and persistent uncertainty for rural hospitals waiting to…
CMS seeks to remove regulatory friction around how clinicians practice and move across state lines as part of its $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program. The agency explicitly incorporated scope-of-practice reform and licensure compacts into its funding methodology for the…
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The American Medical Association is asking Congress to make pandemic-era telemedicine changes permanent ahead of their Jan. 30 expiration. Those flexibilities lapsed amid the recent government closure, coinciding with a 24% national decline in fee-for-service telehealth visits during the first…
Four hospital mergers and affiliations took effect Jan. 1, marking a busy start to 2026 for healthcare consolidation. Here are the four mergers and acquisitions, as reported by Becker’s: 1. Hawarden (Iowa) Regional Healthcare entered a “partner in health” agreement…
CMS has formally established the Office of Rural Health Transformation within the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services, creating a permanent home for the federal government’s $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program. The move follows the launch of the program…
Federal officials and industry leaders outlined key policy shifts ahead for telehealth during the American Telemedicine Association EDGE 2025 Policy Conference Dec. 10, emphasizing that virtual care’s long-term viability hinges on stable rules around licensure, payment, fraud and AI governance.…
From HCA adding hospitals in New Hampshire and Florida to Sanford Health and Marshfield Clinic Health System finalizing their 56-hospital merger, here are 39 hospital mergers and acquisitions completed in 2025: 1. Terre Haute-based Union Hospital and Terre Haute Regional…