Oklahoma will expand access to care, bridging challenges presented by geography and provider distribution, by bringing necessary care to rural residents and bringing rural residents to care. This initiative will improve access to care connections and provision of care, while enhancing core enablers to care, such as teleconnection for specialty care, expanded transport, and expanded community care.

• Telestroke Expansion: Establishing a statewide telestroke network ensures that rural patients receive expert diagnosis and treatment within critical time windows.
• Maternal–Fetal Medicine Telehealth Expansion: Expand the reach of MFM specialists through a tele-MFM network connecting rural hospitals, clinics, and county health departments.
• Transportation Expansion: Extend current pilots in Southwest Oklahoma to the rest of the State on a regional model, closing the transit affordability and availability gaps.
• Community Paramedicine: Establish training programs for community paramedics
• Doulas: Establish training programs for doulas
• Behavioral Health Integration in Primary Care: Convene existing BH and PCP providers interested in upskilling or recruiting PCP providers to prescribe Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) in a PCP setting and / or setting up a comprehensive hub and spoke MAT model
• Technology Cooperative for PCPs and BH providers: Establish a statewide technology cooperative that leverages group purchasing to provide lower-cost access to these tools, along with shared implementation and technical support.
• School-Based Health Services with Focus on Behavioral Health: Expand school-based services for submission to CMS.

Oklahoma will address preventable chronic conditions through proactive, community driven prevention, and management programs. This includes a chronic disease management program supported by consumer-facing technology, remote monitoring, and AI-enabled analytics, as well as community-led population health networks organized through wellness hubs that connect residents and local health departments to determine social determinants of health.

• Closed-Loop Community Care Platform: Support connections to community-based resources for food, housing, utilities, behavioral health, and transportation needs.
• Chronic Disease Management Programs: Provide funding for evidence-based, community-focused chronic disease management programs.
• Consumer-Facing Technology for Chronic Disease Prevention and Management and Behavioral Health: Pilot emerging technologies across consumer-facing prevention and management apps to support individuals in managing their own health journey, with particular focus on supporting maternal health, behavioral health, and the aging population (dual-eligibles)..
• CHW Expansion into Hospitals: Expand the use of CHWs in rural communities to further demonstrate effectiveness and expand coverage of CHWs across payer types.
• Community-Led Wellness Hubs: Allow local health departments to use their high community knowledge to address onetime community health needs and close identified health gaps barred only by lack of funds.
• Lung Cancer Screening: Expand comprehensive lung cancer screening programs in rural areas to improve early diagnosis, connect patients to cessation support, and strengthen the long-term sustainability of screening services statewide.
• Presidential Fitness preparation funding: Expand fitness and wellness programming in rural schools by providing equipment for schools, an interactive cardio- and walking-focused app for students, and professional development for physical education teachers, ensuring that every student—regardless of geography—has access to quality physical education and the resources needed to build lifelong healthy habits.

Oklahoma will strengthen regional coordination across hospitals, clinics, EMS, and community organizations through new multicounty regional collaboratives that share data and operational resources. This includes a shared platform for data reporting, right sizing, and an EMS communications and logistics network for real-time dispatch and education. Collectively, these networks will improve efficiency, expand local service capacity, and reduce duplication of effort.

• Rural-focused CIN: Builds resiliency for rural hospitals through stand up of a rural-focused CIN under a new non-profit owned by the member hospitals.
• Rural Regional Reorientation Plan: Develop a Rural Regional Reorientation Plan, bringing rural hospitals and ecosystem partners (outpatient providers, long-term care, payers) together to align on the future system of care grounded in the needs of rural communities and oriented toward improved access to upstream prevention and primary care.
• EMS collaboration: Develop central coordination to allow for pooled resources and more effective communication across EMS providers to ensure highest use of the assets

Oklahoma will establish financial assistance and transition programs that stabilize rural health facilities and incentivize adoption of value-based payment models. This initiative addresses the root causes of rural hospital instability—low patient volume, payer mix, uncompensated care—by supporting both short-term solvency and long-term reform.

• Value-Based Care Practice Enablement Support: Provide capacity building funds to primary care practices to support business practice transformation including infrastructure to support risk stratification and performance tracking, technical assistance for payment model redesign, contract development and payer negotiation, and development of governance structure to support model.
• PACE Expansion: Fund the startup of 3-6 additional rural PACE centers, helping extend integrated, VBC to thousands of additional dual-eligible seniors.
• Value-Based Clinical Extension Models: Allow practices to pilot programs as part of a comprehensive model.

To build a sustainable workforce pipeline, Oklahoma will expand rural residency programs and rotations, establish provider incentive programs for rural service commitment, and launch “Grow Your Own” initiatives targeting high school and community college students. Training opportunities will include certification and upskilling for existing rural clinicians, particularly advanced practice providers. These actions will reduce care deserts, shorten wait times, and ensure long-term rural retention.

• Rural Residencies: Increase the number of physicians choosing to practice in rural areas by providing robust opportunities for rural healthcare experience in residency.
• Rural Relocation Incentives, Starting with Behavioral Health: Bring BH providers into rural areas of Oklahoma with a five-year commitment, identify additional provider types that are the biggest needs in rural Oklahoma communities and establish similar incentive programs.
• “Grow Your Own” Programs Targeting High School Students: Expand existing programs, like the Oklahoma Department of Career and Technology Education (Career Tech), a State agency that connects students with training opportunities that lead to rewarding careers.

Oklahoma will create a connected rural health data ecosystem by expanding electronic health record (EHR) reach and capabilities, improving interoperability through Health Information Exchange (HIE) enhancement, and developing integrated analytics, and cybersecurity infrastructure. These upgrades will enable real-time information exchange between rural and urban providers, reduce duplicative testing, and support data-driven quality improvement and decision-making statewide.

• EHR Expansion: Close the rural EHR connection gap by providing connections to a low-cost certified EHR technology (CEHRT) EHR for rural facilities without an EHR.
• Interoperability through HIE: Expand its capability to include key data from particular care settings, including imaging and pharmacy. Build a consumer-facing single consent portal for health data to ease the difficulty in collecting behavioral health data by allowing for full health consent management at a single login. Ensuring exchange across modalities will allow providers, clinics, and state-level decision makers greater awareness of rural Oklahoma health needs.
• Integrated Data and Analytics: Identify high-need analytics and dashboards with specific bearing in rural Oklahoma (e.g., smoking cessation, utilization across rural facility type) and establish a data roadmap for added functionality and additional HIE integration for specific modalities.