Carson Valley Medical Center Chief Executive Officer Jeff Prater was named chair of the Nevada Rural Hospital Partners board. His tenure runs through the end of 2023.
The Partners was established as a formal consortium in 1987 with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Hospital-Based Rural Healthcare Program to maintain access to hospital-based healthcare services in rural settings through collaboration and representation.
The organization serves Nevada’s 13 critical access hospitals, which serve nearly a quarter of a million people. Critical access hospitals were designated by Congress in 1997 after hundreds of rural hospitals closed during the 1980s and early 1990s to sustain and improve the availability of healthcare and reduce the risks of financial exposure of rural hospitals.
Prater said NRHP seeks to maintain the viability of rural hospitals through advocacy, shared resources, expanding the use of technology, reducing costs and providing educational programming for member organizations.
“Rural hospitals often face financial, staffing and technology challenges larger healthcare systems don’t,” Prater said. “NRHP fosters collaboration between far-flung hospitals to help serve unmet health needs in our rural communities.”
Prater said due in large part to a grant from the William N. Pennington Foundation, NRHP provided a state-of-the-art mobile MRI unit to serve the Battle Mountain, Hawthorne, Lovelock and Yerington areas.
“I’m proud to chair this extraordinary organization and to leverage the collective cooperation of Nevada’s rural Critical Access Hospitals to bring quality medical care to our rural communities,” Prater said. “Together we are stronger and together we will continue to focus on solutions to the issues facing rural healthcare.”
