The Gazebo Gazette

JACKSON (GG) — On Monday, September 14, Governor Tate Reeves announced 167 awards totaling $104,115,146 through the Mississippi Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP). The awards are part of Mississippi’s $205.9 million first-year implementation budget, which will be allocated this year. They will help modernize, strengthen and transform healthcare in rural communities across the state.

“When we began this work, we set out to do more than simply invest in the healthcare system we already have,” said Reeves. “We set out to transform how rural Mississippians access care – bringing more services closer to home, strengthening the providers and facilities that rural communities depend on, and using technology and innovation to better connect patients to care across our state. Today, we are beginning to see that vision become reality.”

The awards represent only the first three grant opportunities in Year One of a five-year transformation of rural healthcare in Mississippi.

Applications for the Mississippi Rural Health Transformation Program’s workforce and psychiatric emergency services initiatives are currently being reviewed and will be announced in the next 30 to 45 days. These investments will help Mississippi train, recruit and retain the healthcare professionals rural communities need.

Additionally, in October, Mississippi will launch additional opportunities focused on innovative ways to close gaps in rural care and helping rural providers modernize the electronic health record systems they rely on every day.

The awards for Harrison County health systems include:

Rural Provider Technology Grant Program Awards

  • Gulf Coast Outpatient Surgery Center, Harrison County = $25,103 – To upgrade an automated medication dispensing system and badge security access control system which will improve medication accountability, patient safety and physical security.
  • Memorial Health System, Harrison County = $650,000 – To support the Mobile Health Bridge program that combines remote patient monitoring tools with in-home visits by community paramedics and a transitional care nurse. Enables real-time biometric tracking, physical assessments, point-of-care testing and digital documentation in patients’ homes.
  • Memorial Health System, Harrison County = $2,980,874 – To replace manual chemotherapy order transcription with standardized electronic oncology workflow program, which will improve patient safety, reduce errors and delays, and add clinical decision support for dosing and drug interaction review.
  • Memorial Health System, Harrison County = $83,599 – To implement a new breast milk management system that will use barcode verification, real-time validation and end-to-end tracking to improve neonatal safety, standardize workflows and support future expansion across maternal-child services.
  • Memorial Health System, Harrison County = $156,000 – To implement an intelligent document intake platform radiology service, which will automate referral processing by digitizing inbound orders, extracting structured clinical data, and integrating with scheduling and electronic health records systems.
  • Memorial Health System, Harrison County = $684,325 – To launch a clinical communication transformation program to integrate telephony, paging, secure messaging, EHR alerts, call lights and monitoring systems in real-time.

Telehealth Hub Connectivity, Equipment & Education Grant Program Awards

  • Memorial Health System, Harrison County = $72,750 – To fund a regional hub-and-spoke congestive heart failure program providing telehealth, cardiac rehabilitation, and advanced-heart-failure referral pathways.
  • Coastal Family Health Center, Inc., Harrison County = $422,250 – To expand RPM program to rural and low-income patients with uncontrolled hypertension.
  • Memorial Health System, Harrison County = $306,515 – To fund a hub-and-spoke model for diabetes education, navigation, telehealth, remote monitoring, and chronic-disease management.

“Governors know our states best and we know how to set priorities. I also want to thank Secretary Kennedy, Administrator Oz, and our partners at CMS for their leadership and for working with states across America as we put these plans into action. I must also give significant credit to Dr. Edney and his team at the Mississippi State Department of Health, as well as our other partners across the state for their tireless work over the past few months.”

For more information on the Mississippi Rural Health Transformation Program, please visit https://mississippirhtp.com.

This project is supported by the CMS of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of a financial assistance award totaling $205,990,180, with 99.96% funded by CMS/HHS ($205,907,220) and 0.04% funded by non-government sources ($82,960).