Each year, the National Rural Health Association trains nearly 20 rural medical professionals with the aim of expanding healthcare access for small towns.
This year, Ohio Northern University’s own Emily Eddy will serve as one of 18 national fellows. She is a pharmacy professor and leads the Rural and Underserved Scholars program at ONU in rural Hardin County.
She joined the Ohio Newsroom to share her vision for increasing access to medications in Ohio’s pharmacy deserts. More than 200 pharmacies closed in Ohio in 2024.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
On how ONU’s Rural and Underserved Scholars program trains students to work in rural areas
“They do the same thing that all of our pharmacy – and actually we have some nursing students in the program as well – do. But what's a little bit different is they learn how to identify a need. So [they learn] how to do a needs assessment of a community and then they design a project to meet that need and say, ‘Hey, this is a need my community has. How can I design something that would help improve their health?’ And then also, ‘How do I research and know that it was effective? How do I know that this was a good intervention?’ So they get some experience in research [as well].”
On her plans for the increasing healthcare access in Ohio
“My hope is to help expand pharmacist access, specifically in primary care. I think we have a bunch of pharmacists who are ready to help meet some primary care shortages, who can go in and provide screenings of patients who have diabetes [for example]. We can help screen them, identify them and then a lot of it is medication management, right? And who's better to help them with that than a pharmacist? So my goal is to prove that model works and expand it to other parts of Ohio.”
On combating rural ‘brain drain’
“Part of why I think Ohio Northern University is really situated well is that we tend to attract students from a more rural area. So we have talent in rural areas and we need to be able to train them in rural areas. I think trying to provide really quality training in places that look like where we need people to practice.”
On what the state can do to combat pharmacy deserts
“This is a big problem. And one we've felt really strongly in our small community of Ada. We used to have a chain pharmacy that closed, and now we just have one small community pharmacy trying to meet the needs of a lot of places.”
“I think there's several things at play here. One of them is to recognize pharmacists as the providers that they are. Right now, part of the problem is the pharmacy can only get reimbursed if [a pharmacist] gives you a medication, but [they] don't get any reimbursement if [they] sit down with you and talk to you about your diabetes and help get that better controlled. And so until there's a sustainable payment model, it's really hard for pharmacists to do the things that they're trained to do. So I think that's something we really need to work on as a profession and as a healthcare system is to make sure that we're properly incentivizing those pharmacies and those pharmacists to meet needs so that it's not a volume game.”
“It needs to come down to some better reimbursement models and some quality models that will really value what we can offer and put us in a position that will allow us to take care of people because I think we're ready and we're waiting for the opportunity to step in.”
