Rural Healthcare: Tech’s new Gold Rush?

State officials are overwhelmed by the unprecedented surge of interest from tech and health-tech companies, all vying for a piece of a $50 billion government pie. 

The historic $50 billion investment, part of Trump’s tax law, signed in July, tasked CMS with fairly distributing the funding among all 50 states over the next five years, to support a rural healthcare overhaul. The funding comes at a crucial time – the Trump administration has significantly reduced federal dollars for Medicaid. The $1 trillion in cuts over a decade translates to states having less overall money to spend on providing healthcare to vulnerable patients, despite the $50 billion influx. 

States are under tremendous pressure to disburse the funds to vendors that will genuinely help transform rural health care, and whether or not they have the resources to make that decision is a looming question. Players of all sizes, ranging from smaller tech platforms that have long been in the space, to well-resourced Big Tech suddenly interested in helping to solve the problem, are in the queue – all pitching the state players for their solution to be selected.

Experts told Second Opinion they are worried the money could turn into a wasted government effort if not implemented correctly. That includes implementing solutions that don’t work well, or implementing standard enterprise solutions that are ill-fitted to the task of tackling rural health care and its very specific needs.

“States and providers (are) just getting bombarded with outreach. Even we are,” said Carrie Cochran-McLain, chief policy officer at the National Rural Health Association.

NRHA’s Cochran-McLain previously served 15 years in the U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) department, overseeing rural health efforts, understands how high the stakes are to get the transformation done right, particularly given the hospital closures across the country. And she clearly sees the disadvantage states have against better-funded companies who can gather a team of lawyers to write the best proposal in response to state requests.