The Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP) is a five-year initiative focused on strengthening rural communities by improving healthcare access, quality, and outcomes by transforming the healthcare delivery ecosystem.
Donor Name: Alaska Community Foundation
State: Alaska
County: All Counties
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 03/11/2026
Size of the Grant: More than $1 million
Grant Duration: Grant Duration Not Mentioned
Details:
Through innovative system-wide change, the RHTP invests in the rural healthcare delivery ecosystem for future generation. Alaska’s RHTP will advance statewide health system transformation by funding projects that expand access to care, improve health outcomes, strengthen workforce capacity, modernize technology, and advance financially sustainable health care payment models.
Funding will support community-based and system-level projects aimed at improving access, workforce capacity, and care delivery statewide. The program is intentionally structured to promote fair access, a range of approaches, and geographic balance, ensuring that organizations across Alaska, regardless of size, location, or prior funding experience, can participate meaningfully.
The program is administered at the federal level by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and led at the state level by the Alaska Department of Health. The Department of Health serves as the lead for program design, policy direction, funding decisions, and overall stewardship of the initiative.
Priorities
- Healthy Beginnings: strengthens maternal and child health as a foundation for healthy families.
- Health Care Access: expands and sustains essential primary, behavioral, oral, specialty, emergency, home and community-based and post-acute care health services across Alaska’s rural communities.
- Healthy Communities: invests in enhancing access to preventive and primary care services that enable early chronic disease management, expanding the use of consumer-facing digital tools and population health clinical infrastructure, and promoting healthy lifestyles with culturally appropriate community education.
- Pay for Value: Fiscal Sustainability: incentivizes a shift from traditional volume-based reimbursement models to build the long-term financial stability of rural providers through voluntary innovative care and payment models that increase care coordination, lower costs and improve health outcomes.
- Strengthen Workforce: builds a resilient rural health care workforce through pipeline, recruitment, training and retention strategies, alongside wraparound housing and child care supports to help providers remain in rural communities.
- Spark Technology and Innovation: harnesses data and technology to expand the use of consumer wearables and digital devices, enhance telehealth, foster appropriate use of AI, strengthen cybersecurity, facilitate data sharing and system interoperability, and test new delivery modalities using emerging technologies.
Funding Information
Expected total funding for the program: $50 billion over five budget periods.
Eligibility Criteria
Many types of organizations are eligible for RHTP funding, including but not limited to:
- Health care providers
- Tribes and Tribal health organizations
- Hospitals and clinics
- Behavioral health and substance use treatment organizations
- Emergency Medical Services (EMS) and emergency care entities
- Social service organizations
- Local governments
- Health workforce and training programs
- Technology and innovation partners
- Schools, universities, vocational, and other education partners
- Child care providers and early childhood development programs
- Provider and trade associations
- Other nonprofits or community-based organizations working on health or community well-being
For more information, visit ACF.
