Improving Rural Health: How system-level innovation and policy reform can enhance health outcomes across the United States

The United States is hailed as providing the most advanced health care the world has to offer. With cutting-edge medical devices, groundbreaking procedures, and innovative technologies, our hospitals and medical centers define what the global community sees as modern biomedicine. Engineers and clinicians continue to push and reshape this standard with new inventions enabled by a rapidly developing knowledge base. However, the fruit of this advancement has not benefited Americans equally. Millions still face significant obstacles to access health care, and our rural communities in particular have been left behind (see also "The Challenge of Rural Health Care").