Congratulations to NCPA member Gaughn’s Drug Store in Warren, Pa., for receiving nearly $510,000 from the Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP). It will use the funding to renovate the pharmacy to create space for clinical visits, as well as to implement telehealth services for the pharmacy and eventually primary care services, possibly also including specialty services through partnerships with local or national partners. The funding will also go to upgrading infrastructure to improve and expand operational capacity for traditional dispensing and adherence packaging.
The RHTP distributes portions of a $50 billion fund to states to support rural health interventions that improve outcomes around disease prevention, chronic disease management, behavioral health, and prenatal care. States design their own programs for the uses specified here that most address the issues affecting their populations. The program will run through 2030.
To help states procure the required evidence-based data to support inclusion of pharmacy services in their RHT applications, NCPA launched a community pharmacy research library, which includes published papers, outcome metrics, payment and policy analyses, and implementation tools that can be cited in the state proposals.
For more information on the RHTP, contact Brooklyn Morgan, NCPA associate director of state government affairs, at brooklyn.morgan@ncpa.org.
