On Wednesday, UnitedHealth Group announced plans to provide $10 million in loans to help California's rural hospitals adopt electronic health records and upgrade their information technology systems, the San Francisco Business Times reports.
The insurer also plans to provide $1 million in grant funding to kick off the program.
Program Details
Funds for the initiative will come from UnitedHealth Group's $200 million California Health Care Investment Program (Rauber, San Francisco Business Times, 9/1).
As the first step in the program, UnitedHealth Group will provide an additional $200,000 in grants to help the California State Rural Health Association evaluate the health IT needs of California's 31 critical access hospitals. Officials plan to use the assessment to determine which hospitals would benefit from the loan program (Calvan, Sacramento Bee, 9/1).
The selected hospitals then could pool together for the $10 million bond offering that UnitedHealth Group would purchase at competitive rates, officials said. The insurer's $10 million investment would serve as loan financing and its Capital Access Small Issuance Program would cover the bond issuance costs (San Francisco Business Times, 9/1).