“The United States health care and human services delivery system is fragmented, leading to inadequate access, suboptimal quality, and excessive cost. These deficiencies are exacerbated by uncoordinated public policies, payment systems, and grant-making mechanisms that too often operate at cross purposes within the same community. Rather than maintaining old and inefficient silos, new government (and other funder) dollars should leverage integrated planning and programming to improve prosperity, equity, sustainability, and livability of places.

“Effective place-based policies can influence how rural and metropolitan areas develop, how well they function as places to live, work, operate a business, preserve heritage, and more. Properly designed public policies can integrate federal programs and contribute to the prosperity, equity, sustainability, and livability of places. Since rural places face particular challenges related to scale (due to fewer people and greater distances), but advantages related to integration (due to relationships built among a small set of local stakeholders), a place-based policy framework can be a particularly effective strategy.”

The Rural Futures Lab shares this vision for achieving health rural people and places, which was presented in a March 2011 Policy Paper from the RUPRI Health and Human Services Panels (see below).

Our Work

Pursuing High Performance in Rural Health Care 

By A. Clinton MacKinney and Keith J. Mueller
RUPRI Rural Health Panel, January 2012

Place-based Policies and Public Health: The Road to Healthy Rural People and Places 

By Keith J. Mueller and A. Clinton MacKinney
RUPRI Rural Health Panel and RUPRI Human Services Panel, March 2011