
Rural Health Network Planning Program: Lake Okeechobee Rural Health Network
The Georgia Health Policy Center recently spoke to Andrea Stephenson, CEO of the Lake Okeechobee Rural Health Network (LORHN), about plans to expand the network’s work to include telehealth.
To date, what has been the biggest accomplishment or win for your network planning?
Our biggest win for the network is around figuring out the right structure. We are not a new network, but this is a new component of our work and it really challenged our existing structure. We were able to leverage some of our excellent relationships throughout this process, which will be critical for the sustainability of our efforts. It took us a bit of time to figure out that we should really implement a hybrid approach with our LORHN board, serving as the anchor for our work, with advisement from our Telehealth Advisory Group. Our planning focused on assessing the readiness of the community — essentially like a community health planning initiative, but specifically and uniquely focused on telehealth and technology.
What is a tip or early learning that you would share with an organization launching a similar network?
Take some time to process. I think a lot of times when there is so much work to be done and so many opportunities to have an impact in our rural communities, we can fall into essentially almost a trap of just doing and doing, but we really need to take time to process, to be introspective and reflective.
Additionally, part of the process is to keep at the forefront “the why.” Why is this work important? Why are you embarking on this venture? There are times we had to lean on that to reground us and give us important context for the hard work. Also, it is completely okay if you are not experts on everything. We were not (and we still are not) experts in telehealth or technology. But the key is to work on identifying those existing gaps and filling in those gaps through partnerships and through existing resources, like your technical assistant consultant and other external consultants. Recognize and embrace the fact that help and resources can also come in different forms. For example, we found the deliverable templates to be very helpful in assessing where we were in the process. That was a resource that right off the bat we would not have thought of. Those templates did not provide the answers, but they gave us a nice platform for some of the questions that we should have been asking and that we needed to know.
How do you see participation in the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy’s Network Planning Program impacting your broader health improvement efforts?
To be transparent, I was surprised that at times we struggled through some parts of planning because we are not a new network. We know our work and we know our communities. But, as we encountered some of those little hurdles along the way, we worked through that discomfort and that led to learning. That learning, in turn, led to growth. In fact, there were many lessons learned that we can definitely apply to broader health improvement efforts.
The strategy behind our stakeholder engagement resonates here. We appreciated the importance of engaging with them during this time. It was more difficult than it has been at other times and some of that was without doubt because of the pandemic. People were grappling with all kinds of competing priorities. People were burned out and people were struggling during these unprecedented times. So, engaging the different tiers of stakeholders effectively meant that we had to really think about and frame multiple value propositions about why this work was important. This will have a very positive impact on our commitment to broader health improvement.
What will your organization be doing more of or differently to emerge stronger from the pandemic?
The pandemic helped to accelerate the need and also helped to validate that technology and telehealth were potential solutions to some of the issues that we grapple with in rural America where we have access challenges. We will continue to innovate, but at the same time we will be sure to enhance capacity by supporting community engagement and fostering programs and initiatives through which the community will benefit.
We recognize that community engagement is a best practice in the spirit of health equity, to which we are wholly committed. We do not want to be an organization that just talks about health equity, but we want to embrace it and ‘walk the walk.’ That very organic and authentic community engagement is really important. We will continue to stay informed through bidirectional communication. It is important for us to share things with the community, but it is also incredibly important that we are listening to the community and learning from the community. We want to put ourselves in a position to be able to act and not just react to the evolving needs of the communities that we love and care about.