Care Collaborative Programs

The Care Collaborative maintains a Patient Safety Organization (PSO) listed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Being part of a PSO gives rural providers legal protection, expert data analysis and shared learning tools to help overcome resource limitations. The Care Collaborative is the only certified PSO in the region.

Key Benefits for Rural Providers

• Legal and Confidentiality Protections: Federal law provides confidentiality and privilege protections that can ease concerns about a provider’s liability related to quality improvement initiatives.
• Access to External Expertise: For rural providers without specialized risk management staff, a PSO serves as independent experts to review adverse events and conduct root-cause analyses.
• Training and Quality Improvement: PSOs provide specialized education, safety resources and tools to help small teams build a culture of safety without needing to design programs from scratch.
• Networking and Collaboration: Rural providers can connect with a wider network of healthcare systems to share best practices and learn how others solved similar operational challenges.

The Kansas Clinical Improvement Collaborative (KCIC) is a clinically integrated network (CIN) comprised of 49 rural hospitals and associated clinics and 2 independent practices. View KCIC members.

KCIC is led by a board of managers with representatives from each participating organization. The network has established and follows evidence-based standards of care while supporting a coordinated, patient-centered approach across the full continuum of care.

As a CIN, KCIC can pursue single signature payer contracts with health plans. By negotiating jointly, the network can support high-quality, efficient care while creating new opportunities to serve its communities, including direct-to-employer contracting.

Through a $12 million grant awarded by the Patterson Family Foundation in 2025, the Care Collaborative is building a virtual campus to bring specialty services to rural communities via telehealth.

The virtual campus will provide rural residents with local access to endocrinology, rheumatology, neurology, pulmonology and psychiatry specialties. Health system providers will work alongside rural providers to provide patients with related diagnostic and therapeutic services in their own community. In addition to increasing access for specialty care patients, the virtual campus will support workforce development and economic growth in local communities.

The Care Collaborative provides health coaching to individuals across rural Kansas. The centralized team of coaches has provided more than 144,000 chronic care management and remote patient monitoring visits.

Rural providers that lack the infrastructure to deliver coaching services refer patients to the centralized health coaching team. Patients with conditions including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease and arthritis benefit from coaching to set relevant health goals and to make better health decisions to achieve them. These services improve patient outcomes while significantly reducing total cost of care.

In addition to providing health coaching, the Care Collaborative also supports rural providers in standing up and operating their own programs.

The Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP) seeks to improve the health of rural Kansans by expanding primary and secondary prevention programs, securing local access to primary care, building a sustainable rural health workforce, enabling value-based care and harnessing data and technology.

Through federal funding, the Care Collaborative is partnering with the State of Kansas to operate several statewide rural health transformation programs as well as coordinating with other organizations to launch additional programs to benefit rural Kansans.

Learn more about the Rural Health Transformation Program.