Rural Hospital Collaborative Development and Alternatives for New vs Existing Networks

Since the New England Collaborative Health Network (NECHN) last presented at the 2025 Congress on Healthcare Leadership, we have been approached by many individual independent hospitals, community partners in care, existing networks of independent hospitals and other associations looking to learn more about our setup and lessons learned. The 2026 session will review and update the status of our collaborative's year-two development along with our maturing network’s challenges and successes. This will also include the lessons learned and our experience of how helping others turned into helping ourselves. NECHN will share thoughts and opinions on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and risks between a network’s development status (i.e., newly versus existing group or association) and its potential priorities and goals. Finally, not unlike the many pressures rural hospitals are experiencing in their respective regions, we will discuss several complicating factors NECHN experienced using the State of Vermont’s efforts, as our continued case study, to control costs through its programs and initiatives, including Hospital Transformation, Reference Based Pricing and Participation in the CMS Advancing All-Payer Health Equity Approaches and Development (AHEAD Model).

The AHEAD Model is CMS’s new population health-focused payment model aimed at addressing chronic disease, behavioral health and overall improvement of care management for a state's population. It also introduces hospital global budgets for Medicare, Medicaid and commercial payers for not only Vermont but also Hawaii, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and parts of New York City who have been selected to participate in the coming years. We will share our collaborative members' response and corresponding actions to prepare, mitigate and address these challenges both on an individual and collective basis.