Katten Health Care Partner Anthony M. Del Rio was quoted in a recent Part B News article discussing the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS) $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP), emphasizing the program’s unprecedented scope and the practical avenues it creates for providers, in both rural and non-rural areas, to support care delivery innovation across the United States.
Anthony underscored the program's distinctive flexibility and ambition: "It is unique in its size and scale, and in that the states were encouraged to be creative. The federal government very much wanted innovation — looking for [the states to serve as] laboratories, essentially, to try different ideas."
Using Ohio's "rural health innovation hubs" as an example, Anthony highlighted actionable opportunities for providers to engage. He described a model "coalition of different types of providers, ranging from RHCs and CAHs all the way to the highest level of complexity of care; they would take all these different providers and build a network supported by technology solutions that would support true integration across all their platforms."
Expanding on the example, Anthony went on to explain that providers not in an existing network with rural providers could get involved.
"Even if they themselves are not rural providers according to the defined categories, they should still try to identify groups that they could partner with on the rural side," said Anthony. "If you can go to the states and say you’ve worked with rural providers or have some common catchment areas where you share patients, you’re doing a lot of the work that the state would have to do otherwise".
"$50 billion ‘rural transformation' lifts PAs and NPs, and perhaps non-rural practices," *Part B News, January 19, 2026
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