Rural Hospital & Clinic Programs
Community Health Services Development (CHSD)
The Community Health Services Development (CHSD) project is a community health needs assessment process that helps Montana Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) engage members of their rural community, identify and measure the community’s health needs, recognize potential gaps in healthcare services, and develop specific strategies to prioritize and address the health needs that were identified during the CHSD process.
Practice Operations National Database (POND)
The Montana Office of Rural Health has partnered with the MT Flex Program to provide access to the POND (Practice Operations National Database) for no cost to MT Rural Health Clinics. POND is a web-based software Rural Health Clinic benchmarking system that allows for data collection and analytics for Rural Health Clinic (RHC) data. The purpose is to benchmark data from the RHC Cost Report and based on this data, we can then drill down and target specific areas of need in the RHC community.
Visit the MT Flex Program's website for more information and to enroll your health center.
Lean Healthcare Project
Montana State University Industrial Engineering (IE) program in collaboration with the Montana Rural Hospital Flexibility Program selects two students to participate in a summer internship performing Lean Rapid Improvement Projects in 6 Critical Access Hospitals across rural Montana. Over each two-week event, students work in conjunction with hospital staff to apply their knowledge of Lean principles and tools towards a pre-determined improvement project within each facility.
