Pete Walton

The Rural Health Association of Oklahoma (RHAO) and the Oklahoma Office of Rural Health (OORH) combined efforts for the second year in a row to host the Joint Fall Rural and Underserved Health Conference. Representatives from rural hospitals, clinics and other partnering organizations from across Oklahoma attended the three-day conference in Norman. Among the lineup of presenters were Corie Kaiser, Director of the OORH, and Pete Walton, Program Evaluator at the OORH. Their presentation, Critical Access Hospital Performance Rankings and the Office of Rural Health, reviewed various performance measures of Oklahoma's critical access hospitals. iVantage Healthcare Analytics supplied the measures which included hospital rankings on eight pillars of performance and Medicare Beneficiary Quality Improvement Project (MBQIP) quarterly reports. Representatives from each critical access hospital attending the conference received a copy of their own set of performance measures. The OORH uses the performance measures and MBQIP quarterly data to formulate interventions and remediation programs based on a hospital's rankings and reporting trends. The OORH also encourages high-performing critical access hospitals to share their best practices with others. It is important for hospitals to be able to compare their data to other critical access hospitals within the state as well as nationally. These reports also provide data that can be used internally to implement and evaluate their own interventions on a smaller scale. View all of the presentations from the conference.

Responsible for the rural medical education at OSU's College of Osteopathic Medicine, the OSU Center for Rural Health oversees the rural rotations of third & fourth year medical students. The Center also funds programs aimed at providing Oklahoma's rural practitioners, hospitals, and clinics the support necessary to ensure access to quality healthcare for our state's rural residents. For more information please visit our website.