Financial Help for Rural Hospitals

Sharon Hunt, PhD, MBA, associate professor in the School of Health Professions, provides a different kind of service: She works with rural hospitals throughout the state to manage their finances and secure grant money to support their work.

Hospitals in rural Texas face challenges that their big-city counterparts often don’t. “Smaller hospitals don’t have the volume of patients that the larger facilities have, but they still have the high costs,” says Hunt, adding that more than half of rural hospitals operate in the red. A small-town hospital’s emergency room, for example, must be staffed with physicians, nurses and other personnel 24-7, even though it may see fewer than a half-dozen patients in a day. Often, the hospital has to augment its patient income with Medicaid supplements, private donations and state grants — much of which requires navigating a thicket of paperwork.

That’s where Hunt comes in. Hunt, who was a hospital CEO before joining the TTUHSC faculty, has helped a number of hospitals secure grant money. Most recently, she helped Crosbyton Clinic Hospital in Crosby County, Texas, and Coon Memorial Hospital in Dalhart, Texas, obtain major grants from the state’s Health and Human Services Commission. Crosbyton used its $1.1 million grant to convert to a Rural Emergency Hospital and fund a portion of its emergency room physicians’ salaries. Coon Memorial received $375,000, which will likely be used to offset ER costs. In the past decade, Hunt has worked with hospitals in Hereford, Fort Stockton, Anahuac and other small communities, helping them obtain funding for brick-and-mortar expansions, equipment purchases and salary support.

Hunt earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Texas Tech University and worked for an accounting firm before moving into health care. She later spent 16 years — four as chief financial officer and 12 more as CEO — at W.J. Mangold Memorial Hospital and Cogdell Clinics in Lockney, Texas, earning an MBA along the way. In 2012 she left the industry to join the faculty at TTUHSC, where she teaches courses in leadership, health care finance and human resources management, as well as a capstone course for students in the Healthcare Administration and Leadership program.