Limited Resources Haven’t Stopped Western Kentucky from Making Broad Gains in Health Care

In the Commonwealth Fund’s most recent Scorecard on Local Health System Performance, only a small fraction of local U.S. health care markets made substantial progress in expanding access to care, lowering costs, and improving health outcomes. Several of these areas had higher-than-average poverty rates, like rural Western Kentucky. In the first of a new series of Commonwealth Fund case studies examining local regions that improved the most, Sarah Klein, Martha Hostetter, and Douglas McCarthy show how Paducah and surrounding communities leveraged Kentucky’s Medicaid expansion to galvanize an array of improvement efforts.