How Colorado Pharmacies Can Access Rural Health Transformation Program Funding Through Provider Partnerships

The Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP, also referred to as the RHT Program) is a $50 billion federal initiative that sends funds to the states to help address rural healthcare gaps, running from 2026 to 2030. Each state decides how that money gets used: they identify their own gaps, build programs around those needs, and issue Requests for Proposals (RFPs) that local pharmacies and healthcare organizations can apply for directly. This can open up opportunities for your pharmacy to expand your scope of practice, deliver life-changing clinical care, and serve the community that relies on you most.

In this series of blogs, we'll be helping to break down upcoming pharmacy-related opportunities and what infrastructure you need to get grant-ready.

Initiative 1: chronic disease prevention and management; Initiative 6: rural health workforce
Who can apply: Qualified rural health care providers, including eligible rural hospitals, FQHCs and look-alikes, Rural Health Clinics, specified behavioral health providers, physician or non-physician practitioner groups, EMS organizations, and eligible Tribal health facilities. Pharmacies should participate through an eligible lead applicant.
Funding available: $44.7 million for Initiative 1 and $23.8 million for Initiative 6 for Year 1
Application deadline: August 3, 2026, at 11:59 p.m.
Service area: Colorado's 52 rural and frontier counties and 2 federally recognized Tribes
Apply directly here: coloradorhtp-rfa.my.site.com/apply

Colorado's rural and frontier communities face some of the steepest access barriers in the country. Mountain ranges, long distances, and sparsely populations mean that for many residents, the nearest pharmacy is already the closest clinical touchpoint they have.

Colorado's Rural Health Transformation Program was built to close those gaps. Pharmacies are among the most natural partners for the clinical work Colorado wants to fund, even though they're not the state's named lead applicants. Two initiatives fit pharmacy especially well: Initiative 1, which funds chronic-disease prevention, care coordination, training, infrastructure, and data capacity. And Initiative 6, which funds rural workforce development, including pharmacist training, technology implementation, and continuing education.

Who is eligible for Colorado RHTP?

Colorado routes its RHTP dollars through Requests for Applications (RFAs) administered by a state grant vendor, and the named grantees skew toward rural hospitals, Rural Health Clinics, FQHCs, and rural providers. Colorado's current eligibility materials do not list a community pharmacy as a standalone lead applicant. The pharmacy may participate as a clinical partner, subrecipient, workforce-development site, or implementation partner with an approved scope and budget.

Four things reviewers look for:

1. Geography: your pharmacy operates in one of Colorado's rural or frontier counties.
2. Licensing: an active Colorado pharmacy license, collaborative practice agreements where required, and HIPAA compliance. Most pharmacies already have this covered.
3. Clinical infrastructure: structured documentation for patient encounters, outcomes tracking, consumer-facing technology, and readiness to connect with Colorado's health information exchange.
4. Partnerships: evidence of engagement with regional hospitals, FQHCs, or Rural Health Clinics. The lead applicant will generally need a work plan, budget, organizational and partner documentation, measurable outcomes, and the forms required by the current RFA.

What is the Colorado RHTP funding for?

An eligible lead applicant selects the relevant RHTP activity, builds the project work plan, identifies partners, and submits the combined budget. The pharmacy's costs should appear inside that proposal as an approved partner or subrecipient scope. Appropriate costs may include pharmacist and staff time, training, technical assistance, clinical workflow technology, devices or supplies, patient outreach, implementation support, and outcomes reporting when those costs are allowable and tied to the project's goals.

Initiative 1: Chronic disease prevention and management - $44.7M estimated

Initiative 1 focuses on education, prevention, and care coordination for cardiovascular disease, hypertension, obesity, diabetes, and other chronic conditions. The pharmacy's role should be specific: an eligible clinic could refer adults with uncontrolled hypertension to a participating pharmacy for enrollment, validated-device education, scheduled blood-pressure follow-up, medication-related assessment, and escalation back to the care team. The proposal should identify who refers patients, what the pharmacist delivers, how information returns to the partner, and which outcomes will be reported.

How MedMe helps

• Infrastructure to run the programs and prove they work: MedMe's hypertension, diabetes, and behavioral health templates guide each encounter, capture the clinical data, and produce the outcomes Colorado measures, like controlled blood pressure rates and HbA1c trends.
• Clinical services coordination and referral: MedMe's Pharmacy EHR keeps encounter notes, referrals, and follow-up together in one record, so a partner hospital or clinic can see what happened at the pharmacy and count it toward the program's care-coordination goals.
• Two-way connectivity and interoperability: MedMe supports bidirectional data exchange through HIE and QHIN connections built on open standards, pulling a patient's clinical history in and sharing the care your pharmacy delivers back out, so your records are ready to connect with Colorado's health information exchange and partner systems.

Initiative 6: Pharmacist workforce training and technology - $23.8M estimated

Initiative 6 is the clearest pharmacy-specific opportunity because Colorado explicitly includes pharmacists among the rural health professionals it intends to support. Relevant activities include professional development, technology implementation and training for pharmacists, and continuing education in prevention and chronic-disease management. Colorado also proposes measuring the number of pharmacists trained on chronic-disease interventions.

How MedMe helps

• Make rural clinical roles sustainable: Clinical Assistant's AI Scribe drafts structured visit notes from the consultation for pharmacist review, saving around 15 minutes per patient.
• Support training and consistent practice: standardized clinical templates give new or cross-trained staff a repeatable way to document chronic disease care, so a small rural team can run a clinical program without adding headcount.

Scope note: technology should be tied to an approved service, training milestone, and measurable workforce outcome

What clinical infrastructure does Colorado RHTP require?

Your current PMS is built for high-volume dispensing, not for running a clinical practice. MedMe complements your PMS by serving as the clinical-services layer that enables pharmacies to deliver, document, and manage patient care in collaboration with other providers.

How can a Colorado pharmacy apply for these initiatives?

Colorado's current pathway is for pharmacies to join an eligible lead applicant. Use these steps:

1. Choose Initiative 1, Initiative 6, or a connected scope that uses both. Define the rural care gap and the patient population before selecting technology or writing the budget.
2. Approach an eligible rural hospital, FQHC, Rural Health Clinic, physician group, or Tribal health facility serving the same patients. Bring a one-page concept with the service, staffing, partner value, budget range, and proposed measures.
   1. Need a lead, or not sure who's applying near you? Colorado maintains a Potential Grantee Partnership Interest Form for organizations looking to team up. Add your pharmacy, then browse the resulting public list to find a rural hospital, FQHC, clinic, or other eligible lead serving your area. It's meant for Colorado organizations seeking partners: Partnership interest form
3. Define the pharmacy's scope in writing: referral criteria, enrollment, pharmacist activities, training, documentation, follow-up, clinical escalation, data exchange, deliverables, and payment terms.
4. Build an initiative-aligned budget for allowable staff time, training, technology, supplies, outreach, implementation, and reporting. Separate start-up costs from ongoing operating costs.
5. Complete the lead applicant's required partner forms, attestations, and agreements. Confirm licensing, HIPAA, security, consent, and data-sharing responsibilities.
6. Submit through Colorado's portal with the lead applicant and preserve the final work plan, budget, attachments, and executed partner agreement.

The pharmacy's constant job is to deliver the approved services, document encounters that may support billing when payer rules permit, connect information to the HIE or partner systems when required and technically feasible, and report agreed outcomes. The lead applicant remains responsible for the state award.

When to start

The current Colorado RHTP RFA closes August 3, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. Pharmacies should approach an eligible lead as soon as possible with a defined Initiative 1 or Initiative 6 concept, because the lead needs time to finalize its work plan, budget, measures, partner documentation, and submission.

Use the official Colorado RHTP page and application portal, and review the latest guidance before relying on any deadline or requirement. Follow any communication restrictions stated in the RFA. Even if you miss this cycle, building the partnership, documentation model, and reporting infrastructure now can position your pharmacy for future potential RHTP rounds and other value-based opportunities.

Building a sustainability plan

Use the RHTP funding to establish the partnership, train the workforce, configure workflows, and prove that the service improves access or outcomes. The sustainability plan should identify which costs remain after launch and which revenue or savings sources can cover them. Examples of this include:

• Medical billing reimbursement when the service, provider, payer, and contract permit it
• Provider or health-system contracts for defined pharmacy services and reporting
• Value-based or shared-savings arrangements supported by documented outcomes
• Partner contributions, shared technology costs, reduced administration, or expanded service volume

Treat the first funding period as the proof stage: document every service consistently, measure what changed, calculate the operating cost, and give the lead applicant evidence it can use to continue or expand the model.