February 15-21, 2010
February 15-21, 2010 |
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In this Issue...
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VRHA Annual Conference
Call for Presentations! |
| VRHA News |
| Action Alert Update | Updat
HB 1304 and SB 731 Governor McDonnell's office has taken an official position of support for HB 1304. This legislation would create the Virginia Health Workforce Development Authority to take over the duties of the Statewide Area Health Education Centers Program. The mission of the Authority is to facilitate the development of a statewide health professions pipeline that identifies, educates, recruits, and retains a diverse, appropriately geographically distributed and culturally competent quality workforce. VRHA thanks everyone who has worked to move this project forward. If you have not yet, please call your members of the Virginia General Assembly in support of this bill.
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| Members in the News |
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| Virginia Rural Health News |
| Return to Roots |
Return to Roots has launched a new promotional video on YouTube. The video highlights the success of the program in recruiting professionals (including health care providers) who grew up in Southwest and Southern Virginia to jobs in those areas.
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By Shadae Lee - Delmarvanow.com That phrase is the name of the program announced last week by McDonnell and the Virginia Health Care Foundation. The initiative, which will provide mental health care for the uninsured, stems from a challenge grant made a year ago when McDonnell was the state’s attorney general. Half of the funding for the initiative came from settlements McDonnell made with national pharmacy benefits management companies in 2008. McDonnell challenged the health care foundation to raise $1 million to match the state’s contribution. Read the full article.
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| New VAFC Address |
The Virginia Association of Free Clinics has relocated. Their new home is at:
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| National Rural Health News |
| Perriello on Health Reform |
Statement released by Congressman Perriello (VA - Dist 5): For 65 years, the insurance industry has been one of the only sectors other than Major League Baseball to be exempted from America’s anti-monopoly laws. Under the 1945 McCarran-Ferguson Act, insurance companies have long been shielded from federal prosecution for bid rigging, price fixing, and dividing up market territories. When monopolies are legalized, consumers, competition, and quality all suffer, as premiums skyrocket for middle class families. This is the kind of law that only makes sense in Washington because of who writes the checks; for decades, the insurance lobby has held tightly to this exemption. So recently, I unveiled a bill that would end monopoly protections and restore competition among health and medical malpractice insurance companies. The bill is just two pages long and costs the government nothing while saving millions for consumers and government programs. Read the full statement.
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| Action Alert! |
On December 31, 2009, a number of rural Medicare add-on payments expired. Although extenders of these provisions were included in both the Senate and House versions of health reform legislation, these payments have lapsed, jeopardizing access to care for rural Medicare beneficiaries, while health reform lingered. As you well know, rural health care providers operate on a very thin margin and these payments allow them to remain in business and providing care to patients in their communities. Email your Senators today and urge them to, retroactively to the date of their expiration, extend these important provisions as part of any current legislation, along with preventing the 21 percent cut in Medicare physician payments expected at the beginning of March.Hours after a broad $85 billion jobs bill was unveiled by Democratic Finance Chairman Max Baucus and Ranking Member Charles Grassley, Senator Majority Leader Reid announced that a much more scaled-back version of the bill will actually be the legislation that will be debated on the Senate Floor. The larger, bipartisan version of the bill contained an extension of our rural Medicare “extenders” as well as a temporary fix of the Sustainable Growth Rate (the pending 21% cut in reimbursement rate for physicians and others). The scaled-back version of the bill does not contain our Medicare extenders or the SGR fix. Reid has pledged to address these problems in other legislation in the near future - - but has not yet announced specifics.
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| Best Practice Webinars |
NRHA has developed a series of enduring online educational webinars to promote best practices in performance improvement, access to care, workforce development, networking and economic viability. The webinars are rural health related, and this series will provide those who are unable to attend educational conferences the opportunity to learn from the same expert facility and earn continuing education credits from the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP). The webinars are available for download at your convenience for a small fee. Available webinars:
After viewing the webinars and passing a short quiz, attendees will be offered a certificate of completion for education accreditation from the AAFP. Click here to register.
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| Digital Dashboards |
By Russell Nichols - Government Technology If state and local governments need proof that strategic partnerships can attract federal funding for smart technology, public officials might want to examine two community hospitals in a rural strip of northern Ohio. Supported by federal stimulus funds, Fisher-Titus Medical Center in Norwalk, Ohio, and Magruder Hospital in Port Clinton, Ohio, plan to implement Cerner health-care technology systems in the next 10 months, a move that would put the two organizations among the first all-digital, smart hospitals in the nation. These independent hospitals have been partnering for years, but this advanced automated technology, set to go live in April, would create an infrastructure that could eventually build a connected health network.
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Do you have exciting rural health news that needs to be shared? Do you know of an upcoming health-related event which should be on our calendar? E-mail Beth O'Connor at: boconnor@vcom.vt.edu |
Disclaimer: The VRHA circulates state and national news as an information service only. Inclusion of information is not intended as an endorsement. If you prefer to receive email in plain text or rtf format instead of html or if you receive this email more than once, email VRHA. |
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