Florida state officials are planning the next steps in the state’s efforts to address rural healthcare challenges and unmet needs.
Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) has unveiled an $188 million investment through six programs to improve healthcare services in rural communities. Applications are due by July 31.
The funding will be distributed through the Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP). The RHTP is a state initiative designed to ensure rural communities have access to quality healthcare through care models, technology integration and workforce investment.
The initiative is sustained by the federal RHTP program established through the One Big Beautiful Build Act. The federal version allocated $50 billion to distribute over the course of five years across the nation. Florida was selected to receive $210 million in total for Fiscal Year 2026.
Alongside the announcement, the RHTP released Requests for Applications (RFA) across the agency’s four regions. Entities qualified to apply for funding include for- and non-profit healthcare providers, community organizations and entities with non-rural headquarters that demonstrate their capacity for deployment in those locations. The grant opportunities include:
- Preventive Care and Care-at-Home Bundle.
- Specialty & Acute Care Bundle.
- Rural & Satellite Clinics.
- Workforce Development.
- Health & Lifestyle.
- Value-Based Purchasing.
Recipients will use their share of the funding to support initiatives aligning with the program’s core values. These may include investing in personnel and staffing, training and workforce development or operations and implementation support. Additional activities may include community partnerships and outreach or providing limited meals for approved program travel, educational demonstrations or required all-day trainings.
As part of its efforts to transform healthcare systems in rural areas, the RHTP supports 15 targeted initiatives designed to improve and progress goals outlined in the program’s core focus areas: care delivery, technology, behavioral health and workforce development. These initiatives include:
- Establishing new or satellite clinic locations to provide consistent local care.
- Deploying mobile health units to bring critical care to difficult-to-reach areas.
- Supporting community paramedicine, ensuring EMS teams can offer in-home care, post-discharge follow-up and chronic disease support.
- Connecting rural patients to mental health and psychiatric provider through telehealth services.
- Advancing virtual specialty clinics and cloud-based imaging support through local rural sites.
- Providing round-the-clock remote monitoring and virtual critical-care consultations for rural hospitals.
- Enabling rapid stroke evaluation through real-time neurologist video consultations.
- Developing local healthcare workforces with training, rotations, housing support and recruitment pipelines.
- Ensuring rural providers can shift toward quality-based payment and shared-savings models.
- Providing home devices and AI-supported monitoring for chronic diseases.
- Integrating nutrition counseling, preventative screening, education and community wellness programs.
- Expanding access to same-day care and medication consultation in pharmacies through dedicated kiosks.
- Implementing cloud-based PACS and diagnostic systems for imaging and lab result sharing.
- Connecting providers to the Florida HIE and Encounter Notification Service for real-time ADT alerts and data exchange.
- Educating and enrolling rural residents who qualify for integrated Medicare-Medicaid coverage.
Photo by Erik Mclean from Pexels
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