Healthcare organizations across the country continue to face tremendous financial and workforce challenges, many of which have worsened amid a global pandemic.
And though the federal public health emergency expired May 11 — and the World Health Organization declared that the spread of COVID-19 is no longer a global health crisis — that doesn’t mean the difficulties that have emerged over the past three years will suddenly disappear.
For independent hospitals serving rural communities, these challenges are not entirely new. Even in the years before the pandemic, rural hospitals were…
