Weekly newspaper in Adair County does a special section on health and sends it to everyone in the county

Special sections on health are good for community newspapers and their readers. Health-care providers have money for advertising in such sections, and a section focused on health can have more impact on readers than individual, occasional stories.

Based on a pilot project it oversaw in 2007, the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues began recommending to rural newspapers that they schedule health sections as part of editions that are mailed to every postal customer in a paper's home county, a standard circulation-building technique. If a newspaper wants to help improve the health of its community, why not reach everyone in the community?

Last week, one Kentucky newspaper did that. The Adair County Community Voice of Columbia included a 10-page broadsheet section on health in an edition that was mailed to everyone in the county. And though it got no advertising from the local public hospital, with which it has been embroiled in an open-meetings dispute, it did get ads from hospitals in other counties.

Newspapers can mail up to 10 percent of their annual circulation to non-subscribers in their home county at subscriber rates, and can sell "sponsored circulation" to pay the extra cost of printing and postage for the extra copies. The 2007 pilot project with another Kentucky weekly, The Berea Citizen, found that non-subscribers said they were more likely to subscribe if the paper regularly included health information. For a copy of the report on the project, click here. The health section is not online, but PDFs of its pages are posted on the Institute website in a 4.4 MB file, here.

Ky., Ohio, Tenn. and W.Va. join forces to fight prescription-drug abuse amid questions about use of Ky. system

Kentucky has formed a partnership with Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia to help fight prescription drug abuse, "even as questions linger over how well the state has used its own electronic monitoring resources," reports Mike Wynn of The Courier-Journal.

The Interstate Prescription Drug Task Force will comprise about 30 experts from law enforcement and drug agencies. They are charged to come up with ways to lessen prescription drug abuse and sales. "We do a good job from a law enforcement standpoint, but by working together, we can better identify prescribers, dispensers and patients who are exploiting our borders," Gov. Steve Beshear said in announcing the task force Wednesday.

Task force members will share drug information the state collects on who receives and prescribes certain medications. Kentucky's system is known as KASPER, short for Kentucky's All Schedule Prescription Electronic Recording system. How well the data compiled by the system are being used came into question last week when House Speaker Greg Stumbo, D-Prestonburg, pressed the Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure to explain why it wasn't analyzing the numbers, which it had asked for permission to obtain, Wynn notes.

Rural hospitals to get federal help for recruiting physicians

Critical-access hospitals will get help recruiting physicians to their rural areas through an expanded loan repayment program that is part of President Obama's new jobs initiative for rural America.

The initiative is called the National Health Service Corps, Alexandra Wilson Pecci of HealthLeaders Media reports. The 1,300 critical-access hospitals can use federal loans to recruit new physicians. A press release from the White House states the addition of one primary care physician in a rural community generates about $1.5 million in annual revenue and creates 23 jobs annually.

Kentucky has 30 critical-access hospitals, which must be in rural areas, 35 miles from another hospital or 15 miles from another hospital in mountainous terrain, according to the Rural Assistance Center. The average CAH creates 107 jobs and generates $4.8 million in payroll annually, the White House says.

The jobs program also includes an agreement that will "link rural hospitals and clinicians to existing capital loan programs to help them buy health IT software and hardware and jump the typical rural hospital hurdle of limited access to capital and lower financial operating margins," HealthLeaders Media reports.

A few days before announcing the jobs program, the White House Rural Council released a report that outlined recent investments in rural healthcare access. Those include placing more than 2,600 clinicians in rural communities and providing distance learning and telemedicine services to more than 2,500 rural healthcare and educational facilities. It also highlighted an investment of 500 projects across the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs health care system that support rural health care. That includes 404 community-based outpatient clinics and 48 outreach clinics in rural areas.

On average, rural counties had 62 primary care doctors for every 100,000 residents in 2008, compared to 79.5 primary care doctors in urban areas, the Rural Council report said. (Read more)