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New National Organization Advocates Mobile Healthcare as Key for Rural Areas [1]
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Date: 2025-03-24
According to a new advocacy group, the key to getting healthcare to rural communities may be to bring mobile health clinics to them instead of asking patients to travel long distances to healthcare facilities.
Driving Health Forward brings together a wide base of stakeholders – from schools and mobile health clinic operators to healthcare companies and vehicle manufacturers – that can provide patients in rural communities the care that they need.
“The healthcare industry has a distribution problem,” said Dr. Nancy E. Oriol, Harvard Medical School’s associate dean for community engagement in medical education.
“Mobile health clinics are a critically needed bridge between communities, brick and mortar clinics and even telehealth operations in order to deliver healthcare to everyone. Driving Health Forward is bringing the right people together for a viable, long-term solution.”
The base of the group, some 80 people, met in February to work out the initial steps needed to move the campaign forward. The group hopes to advance policy initiatives, best practices and partnerships in order to provide more access to health care, create more investment in mobile health clinics and find an achievable path to financial stability for mobile health clinics providing services to rural communities.
Supported by the Leon Lowenstein Foundation, a Connecticut-based family foundation, the idea of the group grew out of the mobile health initiatives started during the Covid-19 pandemic. The group included rural health providers, such as Dr. Phillip Levy, as well as representatives from the American Cancer Society, the Mobile Healthcare Association, the Mobile Health Initiative from the University of Minnesota, Mobile Specialty Vehicles and Medpod, a technology company that provides healthcare providers with proprietary telediagnostic equipment
“The Leon Lowenstein Foundation has been supporting the general concept of mobile health care and initially was supporting the build out of some programs and trying to advance the general concept,” said Levy, professor of emergency medicine at Wayne State University, in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “As things accelerated during the pandemic with place-based service delivery …It sort of pushed the agenda forward. The Lowenstein Foundation stepped back a little bit and started to really ask what’s our best role here?”
Now, as financial structures for providing mobile healthcare change, and rural healthcare clinics and hospitals closures leave some in rural communities with hours-long drives to get healthcare, the new campaign hopes to marry rural healthcare needs with mobile solutions.
Rural residents face barriers to accessing healthcare, the group reported in its case study. Morbidity and mortality rates remain high in rural areas when compared to urban areas, the group found, and the current healthcare infrastructure can’t meet the current demand for essential care. Between 2010 and 2021, 136 rural hospitals closed, according to the American Hospital Association. More than 700 rural hospitals are at risk of closing, a report from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform found in August 2024.
Levy said the Driving Health Forward group, as it is starting out, will work to determine how best to provide the services rural communities need by assessing what gaps mobile health clinics can bridge in rural communities.
“Mobile care is really a platform to bring services to communities where there may be barriers to accessing services,” Levy said. “If you take mobile care into rural environments, is it screening for things like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, high cholesterol, and obesity and bringing resources to support that? Or is it actual care provision because you don’t have cardiovascular disease specialists or what have you? So… we need to be able to know what the key features of this are that need to be advocated for and supported to grow this movement.”
That could range from funding to support the startup and building of the clinics based on what communities say they need, or helping to move policy forward that would create a sustainable revenue stream to keep them open and operating, he said.
For now though, the organization is looking for more people to be a part of determining where Driving Health Forward goes from here.
“The important thing is to get people who want to be involved in Driving Health Forward and get organizations who are willing to formulate committees and be part of the different components of an agenda around the organization,” he said. “What came out of the meeting was… what are the pillars of what we want to see happen for mobile care and how do we make sure that they’re inclusive and represent all different perspectives? Going forward it’ll be a further refining of the big tent agenda.”
More information about Driving Health Forward can be found on the organization’s website.
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