Bridging the Rural-Urban Divide: Cultivating Digital Health Innovation in America’s Heartland

Geography should not be a determining factor for health status. Yet, in the US, the zip code you live in plays an outsized role in determining your health and life expectancy. It directly impacts whether one has access to preventative care, healthy foods, and good job opportunities. This is the unfortunate reality for the nearly 60M Americans who live in rural communities. Across hundreds of small towns and farms today, we see a population that trends older, with greater health disparities, and often lacking both access to care as well as financial resources to address their health concerns. Despite advances in public health and medical treatments, rural residents are becoming more likely than their urban counterparts to die prematurely from the leading causes of death in the US. In 1999, the natural-cause mortality rate for working-age adults in rural areas was only 6% higher than for urban residents in the same age bracket. By 2019, the gap widened to 43%. These communities are also seeing an alarming rise in “deaths of despair,” which include deaths related to drug overdose, alcohol abuse, and suicide. Between 2000-2020, suicide rates increased 46% in rural areas compared to 27% in urban areas.

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