College of Education and Health Professions Researchers Receive Rural Health Transformation Funds

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently announced that two researchers from the College of Education and Health Professions have been awarded a grant through Arkansas' Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP).

Michelle Gray and Divya Bhagianadh, who study aging in the college's Department of Health, Human Performance, and Recreation, will team up for the Rural Health Readiness Initiative for Older Adults and Caregivers, a project designed to improve healthcare access by increasing telehealth readiness among older adults and family caregivers in rural Arkansas.

"Arkansas has made significant investments in expanding telehealth, and we want to support rural communities in realizing the full benefits of those investments," Bhagianadh said. "Making telehealth available is an important first step, but older adults and family caregivers also need the skills and confidence to navigate these services."

The project hopes to overcome the gap between telehealth availability and telehealth utilization, something Gray called a "critical barrier" to achieving the full potential of these programs.

"While Arkansas continues to invest in telehealth infrastructure, many rural residents remain unable to fully benefit from these services since they lack the digital literacy, confidence and practical skills needed to effectively engage with telehealth," Gray said.

The project's initial phase will focus its work in Dallas County. There, they plan to pilot telehealth-readiness training for older adults and caregivers through training materials, a resource website, AI-supported navigation, train-the-trainer workshops and community education.

Gray said telehealth is a key platform for improving health outcomes in Dallas County, given its shortage of healthcare providers. They hope that by the end of the first year, they will have engaged roughly 400 older adults and caregivers in the county and trained a team of community-based Telehealth Readiness Ambassadors.

"By addressing the human and community factors that influence telehealth adoption, the initiative will strengthen healthcare access, improve utilization of existing telehealth services, reduce barriers to care and establish a sustainable readiness infrastructure to fully benefit from ongoing investments in telehealth," Gray said.

The grant is part of nearly $150 million recently awarded by the state through the RHTP. Gray and Bhagianadh's grant falls under the program's Telehealth, Health-Monitoring and Response Innovation for Vital Expansion (THRIVE) initiative, which funds projects to modernize rural health care delivery by expanding telehealth, strengthening emergency medical response and deploying remote patient-monitoring technology.

"Arkansas' rural communities are home to families who work hard, care for their neighbors and deserve access to quality health care close to home," Gov. Sanders said.

The 50 total projects awarded by the RHTP engage rural hospitals, health systems, emergency medical service providers, community health centers, universities and nonprofit organizations serving communities across Arkansas.