KEARNEY, Neb. — Outside of Lincoln or Omaha, the vast majority of the state utilizes rural health care. Understanding the disparities between urban health and rural health could greatly improve the lives of those living in rural areas.
A new organization launched Monday at the Rural Health Conference in Kearney aims to do just that.
The Greater Nebraska Rural Research Network, part of the Nebraska Rural Health Association, hopes to connect researchers to hospitals to get patients involved in rural research projects.
“And it’s frustrating that there are disparities in health that have persisted now for a while, where living in a rural area means a higher likelihood of death, of depression, and worsening of a lot of other conditions,” said Ryan Larsen, CEO of Community Medical Center in Falls City.
Participation in research has been shown to improve health outcomes, even before results are known.
“If we’re concerned that you have decreased quality of care or you have decreased lifespan or decreased health in rural America, just simply having them involved in something automatically, statistically, has been shown to improve that,” said Brian Shelmadine, chief medical officer at Box Butte General Hospital in Alliance.
Some hospital leaders are concerned they don’t have the numbers to make a meaningful impact, but the network hopes to change that by pooling patients across multiple facilities.
“If you’ve got a hospital that’s only got five or six people with a specific condition, there’s a bunch of hospitals across Nebraska that might have five or six people with a given condition. And all of a sudden, you’ve got enough people to do a study and try and figure out something to make their world better,” said Jeff Ordway, operations manager of the Greater Nebraska Rural Research Network.
Researchers are already starting to look at doing projects in rural Nebraska, including one woman from Dartmouth College studying the use of elective induction in rural areas.
Part of the motivation for studying rural landscapes is to build trust with patients and conduct research in settings like their own.
“And that’s an issue that gets raised by providers in rural settings. Like, how do I know that, you know, I’m not going to make things worse for my patients? Because the study was conducted in urban areas,” said Sanam Roder-Dewan, associate professor at Dartmouth College.
For her research to work, hospitals need to participate. The Rural Research Network is recruiting hospitals now to get a large enough sample size for her research and other research projects to succeed.
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