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HIGHLIGHTS
- Rural communities face major barriers to substance use disorder care.
- Abt evaluates RCORP performance and strengthens data quality nationwide.
- Clearer evidence guides targeted support and stronger rural behavioral health services.
PROJECT
Rural Communities Opioid Response Program (RCORP)
The Challenge
Rural communities face persistent barriers to reducing substance use disorder, including opioid use disorder. Limited provider availability, long travel distances, workforce shortages, and fragmented care systems make it harder for people to access prevention, treatment, and recovery services when they need them most.
The Rural Communities Opioid Response Program (RCORP), led by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), was created to help communities overcome these constraints. As the initiative has expanded into a large national portfolio, HRSA must understand what is working across hundreds of grants. Enhancing the clarity and consistency of grantee reporting—while accounting for programmatic variation and inevitable data irregularities—enables HRSA to better understand progress and provide timely support to communities most impacted by substance use.
The Approach
In partnership with Customer Value Partners (CVP), Abt and TSPi, a Division of Abt Global, are supporting the evaluation component of RCORP.
To help HRSA understand how RCORP investments address real-world constraints in rural communities, Abt guides the initiative’s biannual processing of grantee data, responds to agency requests for information on key performance indicators, and contributes to causal analyses and grantee capacity building activities.
Ultimately, the evaluation aims to assess how RCORP activities expand access to substance use disorder services, strengthen local capacity, and support sustainable service delivery across diverse rural settings.
Abt also implements rigorous data quality assurance activities when processing data from 630 HRSA grantee organizations. We review behavioral health data, flag anomalous values, support grantees in resolving data issues, and ensure our final deliverables reflect learnings from grantee conversations. These analyses identify evidence-based programming gaps and technical assistance needs, helping HRSA and grantees use data to improve coordination, strengthen services, and inform future funding decisions.
The Results
Abt’s evaluation and data quality assurance work is strengthening HRSA’s ability to observe how RCORP investments perform across varied rural contexts. Reliable and consistent performance data gives HRSA clearer insight into the impacts of this funding on communities, needed service expansion, and capacity building to further support communities.
By contributing to RCORP-Evaluation’s chartbooks and other data products, Abt helps identify gaps in programming, coordination, and sustainability. These insights guide targeted technical assistance and support continuous improvement, helping rural communities strengthen behavioral health services and informing how HRSA shapes future RCORP opportunities.
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