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About the Rural Health Research Program
The Rural Health Research Program is built on the thirty-five year history of rural health services research at the University of North Carolina's Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. The program draws on the experience of a wide variety of scholars and researchers, analysts, managers and health service providers associated with the Center. The Program also has an ongoing partnership with the NC Foundation for Advanced Health Programs, Inc. of the Office of Research, Demonstrations and Rural Health Development in the NC Department of Human Resources.
The Rural Health Research Program is working to identify problems in the rural health arena through policy-relevant analyses, the geographic and graphical presentation of data, and the dissemination of information to organizations and individuals in the health care field who can use this information for policy or administrative purposes. The Program's research involves primary data collection, analysis of large secondary data sets, and in-depth policy analysis. The Program brings together a diverse, multidisciplinary team including clinicians in medicine, nursing, pharmacy, allied health, mental health, and other professions and disciplines along with experts in biostatistics, geography, epidemiology, sociology, anthropology and political science to address complex social issues affecting rural populations.
The Program's present policy analysis and research agenda focuses on the following substantive areas: measures of underservice, Medicare reimbursement policy, Medicaid, and access to care. The Program also has an active dissemination component and emphasizes the use of geographic methods in research.
Nested within the Rural Health Research Program is the North Carolina Rural Health Research and Policy Analysis Center (NC RHR & PAC), one of three federally-designated policy analytic centers funded by the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy, Health Resources and Services Administration, Public Health Service, US DHHS Grant No. 1UICRH03714-01-00. The NC RHRP is also funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the State of North Carolina, and FirstHealth of the Carolinas.
