Delta Health was recently awarded Colorado's Rural Provider Access and Affordability Stimulus Grant worth $650,000.
State Representative and Delta Health Board member, Matt Soper along with Representative Julie McCluskie worked to create the grant opportunity in 2022. Soper was a prime sponsor to the bill that allocated funds for rural healthcare.
“We took $10 million dollars from the American Rescue Plan, dollars that come to Colorado, to be able to really help our rural hospitals. This year in 2023, I ran a budget amendment to add an additional million dollars to the grant fund to move up to $11 million in total,” said Soper.
The Rural Provider Grant will be used to upgrade software for the hospital’s electronic health record system by adding an oncology module, a hospital-wide scheduling module, and a blood bank module.
“The current system has the ability for different add-ons to different modules that we didn't buy when we initially invested in the EMR. Specifically our oncology department has really grown so much in the last few years that they were really in desperate need of some kind of electronic data record to help their system and their processes,” commented Delta Health CEO Julie Huffman.
Upgrades to the three modules are slated to be operational by early spring 2025 and will address issues related to care coordination by using real-time information across several departments and care settings.
Soper says funding for the Rural Provider Access and Affordability Stimulus Grant is a one time funding opportunity that will ‘sunset’ next year. This year 33 rural hospitals across the state submitted applications to fund 47 projects, with only 24 projects receiving critical funds.
“There’s clearly a need from our rural hospitals to be able to continue to have a grant program like this because these are needs that boards really struggle to spend money on. And none of our rural hospitals are making much money. Most are operating just barely above water,” said the state legislator from Delta.
Soper says the likelihood that this type of grant to help struggling rural hospitals going forward doesn’t look good.
“ I’m not real sure that we’re going to be able to continue this particular grant fund just because we kind of going into some uncertain economic times and it was not included in the governor’s budget. We’ll definitely have to go back and say ‘as a state do we purposely want to create a grant fund like this modeled after what we had from Senate Bill 200.”
Despite the uncertainty going forward, Delta Health CEO Julie Huffman expressed gratitude to State Representative Matt Soper for working to create the Colorado Rural Provider Access and Affordability Stimulus Grant.
“He has been such a tremendous asset to us in so many ways and I just want to make sure our gratitude is made clear,” said Huffman.
Rural Provider Access and Affordability Stimulus Grant Program Awardees
