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Center Launches Updated Population Health Toolkit to Support Improvements in Health Outcomes of Rural Communities

The National Rural Health Resource Center (The Center) has launched the 2025 update to its Population Health Toolkit, which is designed to assist State Offices of Rural Health, state Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility (Flex) Programs and individual health care organizations as they seek to better understand, manage and improve population health in their communities and states.

The online toolkit, developed and maintained with support from the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Federal Office of Rural Health Policy, includes:

  • A population health readiness assessment that allows health care facilities to gauge their preparedness for population health
  • Tools and resources to support health care facilities as they build their population health management capabilities
  • A web-based dashboard that displays county, state, national and, when available, facility-level data on a range of population health measures, organized into more than a dozen scenarios that explore health conditions, health inequities and the leading causes of death in rural America
  • Tutorial videos that offer step-by-step guidance on conducting population health analytics

Toolkit contents can be used to gain a better understanding of local and statewide health patterns; to assess organizational readiness for population health; to inform community health needs assessment processes and even to compare individual health care facilities’ performance with peers from across the state or country.

Have any questions about the Population Health Toolkit? Contact Tracy Morton, Director of Population Health, at tmorton@ruralcenter.org. 

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