As of January 1, 2020, the rural hospital closure crisis has claimed 120 facilities across the nation. Although the number of rural hospital closures slowed somewhat in 2016 (12) and 2017 (10), there have been 34 closure announcements in the last 24 months.
The accelerated rate at which rural hospitals are closing continues to unsettle the rural healthcare community and demands a more nuanced investigation into rural hospital performance. Building upon its existing research into the stability of the rural health safety net, The Chartis Center for Rural Health developed a multilevel logistic regression model designed to identify the probability of closure for the nation’s 1,844 open rural hospitals.
