The Federal Office of Rural Health Policy funds a number of programs to carry out its advisory and compliance roles, including supporting clearinghouses for collecting and disseminating information on rural health care issues, promising approaches to improving and enhancing health care delivery in rural communities, and policy-relevant research findings addressing rural health care delivery.
The Rural Health Research Center Program is the only Federal research program entirely dedicated to producing policy-relevant research on health care and population health in rural areas. Each Research Center has its own identity (although it may be part of a larger organization), website, and core staff that include a disciplinary mix of health services research, epidemiology, public health, geography, medicine, and mental health. Over the four-year award cycle, each Research Center develops a portfolio of several research projects per year in conjunction with input from the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy and other experts.
To strengthen the dissemination of research results, the Rural Health Research Gateway 
was launched in early 2006. The Gateway is a “one stop shop” for the Research Centers providing easy access to projects funded by FORHP and summaries of research in progress. The Gateway’s Research Alerts provide e-mail updates when new publications become available.
Data collection and analysis is essential to understanding the challenges in rural communities, how those communities are impacted by policy and setting policy for the future. For this reason, the work of the Rural Health Research Centers informs that of FORHP’s policy team and vice versa.
