Sanders announces nearly $150 million in rural health grants

Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Thursday announced nearly $150 million in grants to hospitals, clinics and other organizations from Arkansas’ share of the $50 billion fund established by the sweeping tax and spending bill passed by Congress last year.

The largest single grant, worth approximately $12.7 million, went to Mercy Health Fort Smith Communities, for a project serving Sebastian, Scott and Logan counties.

The grant, according to a news release, will “preserve critical-access hospital services” in Booneville, Waldron and Paris, as well “strengthen Mercy Hospital Fort Smith as a regional hub through preventive, specialty, diagnostic, and procedural care.”

The next largest grant, $10 million went to the Arkansas Ambulance Association for a statewide project to “replace ambulances and add telehealth communications, connectivity and patient-monitoring equipment, data sharing, training, and a Patient Navigation Hub.”

“This investment represents an extraordinary opportunity for Arkansas EMS and, more importantly, for the rural communities our providers serve every day,” Amanda Warren-Newton, president of the association’s board of directors, said in a release.

“In many areas of our state, EMS professionals are not simply the first healthcare providers a patient encounters — they may be the only healthcare professionals immediately available.”

The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, according to a news release, received almost $12 million combined across four projects.

Sanders announced late last year that Arkansas had received $208.8 million as its first of five expected installments from the Rural Health Transformation Program, a provision of the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Donald Trump in July.

The awards announced Thursday were from two of the four initiatives planned from Arkansas’ share of the funding.

That included $93.6 million from the Promoting Access Coordination and Transformation (PACT) initiative.

The remaining $55.7 million was from the Telehealth, Health-Monitoring, and Response Innovation for Vital Expansion (THRIVE) initiative.

In all, 50 grants were awarded from the two initiatives, Sanders said at a news conference, with at least two projects serving each of the state’s 75 counties.

“PACT and THRIVE, which we’re awarding today … aren’t just blank checks,” the governor said.

“They’re focused on solutions we know will improve Arkansas’ outcomes in the long term — preventative and behavioral health, telehealth and remote patient monitoring, skills training for our healthcare workers, improved nutrition and exercise guidance, maternal and prenatal health and partnerships with our churches and faith communities.”

Grants from Arkansas’ other two planned initiatives — Recruitment Innovation Skills and Education for Arkansas (RISE AR) and Healthy Eating, Active Recreation, and Transformation (HEART) — will be announced later, according to the release.

State Rep. Bart Schulz, R-Cave City, said the awards were “a good first step” in addressing health needs in rural areas.

“I think it’s fantastic, it shows that this initiative has the right thing in mind,” Schulz said. “Arkansas is a very rural state, and our Arkansas team worked really hard to get the proper information when we requested the funding, and I think it paid off.”

Schulz’s district includes part of Independence County, a county served by eight of the projects funded through the grants announced Thursday.

The lawmaker said he was proud to see significant funding directed toward emergency medical services statewide and hoped other investments would “move the needle” on maternal health issues.

One such maternal health initiative was from the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine at Arkansas State University, which received $1,524,031 as part of PACT.

That funding will go toward the college’s Mobile Health Unit Maternal Health and Education Access Initiative, run through the medical school’s Delta Population Health Institute to serve Mississippi and Poinsett counties.

“What we found out in our work in maternal health care is that transportation is one of the major issues and drivers for the mothers in those counties, and so we are blessed and fortunate to receive funding to purchase a mobile health unit,” said Tiffny Calloway, the institute’s director of operations.

About $500,000 will go toward the unit itself, Calloway said, with other funds to purchase a pair of passenger vehicles, bring on a program director and hire two drivers.

Calloway said her organization would reapply for funding in the following two years, with goals of serving about 250 pregnant and postpartum women, providing at least 250 maternal health screenings and providing at least 200 trips for related appointments.

The UAMS projects that received funding are called Virtu-RURAL (Remote Upgrades to Rural Arkansas Locations), Stroke Pathways to Advance Rural Knowledge (SPARK), Specialty Telehealth Access for Rural Communities in Arkansas (STAR) and Arkansas Pregnancy Care Connect.

“Improving rural healthcare is one of the most significant issues in our state,” said Dr. C. Lowry Barnes, UAMS chancellor, said in the UAMS release. “Where someone lives should not determine the quality of care available to them.”

SPARK, the recipient of UAMS’s largest grant (about $5.4 million), will build a “coordinated system” to connect rural communities, emergency medical services and primary care providers, according to UAMS.

In the first round of Rural Health Transformation Program, for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, all 50 states received $100 million as a fixed funding amount, plus a varying level of other assistance based on an internal formula involving factors such as rural population, proportion of health facilities that are in rural areas and situations of certain hospitals, according to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Texas, awarded more than $281 million, received the largest amount from the program, while New Jersey received the least — about $147 million.

“The Trump Administration’s Rural Health Transformation Program is based on one simple idea: your access to quality health care shouldn’t depend on your ZIP code,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator, in the governor’s release. “Funding new approaches to expand access to both primary and specialty care is a critical step toward achieving that vision for Arkansans, and I look forward to seeing RHTP investments drive equally transformative innovations for rural communities nationwide.”

In December, The Associated Press reported that Oz said $12 billion over five years — nearly half of the non-baseline component — was contingent on whether states had passed policies aligned with the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” strategy.

Arkansas has already implemented at least one of Oz’s given examples. The state’s ban on using of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funds to purchase candy and soft drinks took effect July 1.

While Oz lauded the awards as “an extraordinary milestone for rural health in America” at the time, many policy experts have noted the money will only offset a fraction of the Medicaid cuts included in the Trump megabill.

Analysis from KFF, a health policy research organization, projected that federal Medicaid spending in rural areas would shrink by about $150 billion during the next 10 years due to provisions in the bill.

Those include the work requirement that states must implement by Jan. 1 for Medicaid expansion enrollees and stricter limits on the taxes states are allowed to levy against providers as a way of increasing the federal matching funds the states can access.

Read more: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2026/aug/27/gov-sarah-huckabee-sanders-announces-almost-150/