Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Dr. Holland Haynie is the Chief Medical Officer of the Central Ozarks Medical Center, in Osage Beach, Missouri, and a practicing rural physician. After completing medical school, he went on to train in Rural and Frontier Family Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, where he developed a deep foundation in strengthening healthcare access in rural communities. With over 20 years of experience, Dr. Haynie is now imagining new ways to realize the unique potential of rural healthcare.
This year, Dr. Haynie launched Rethinking Rural with a simple belief that the future of healthcare should be shaped in real clinics and small-town exam rooms rather than in distant, urban tech hubs. What started as informal conversations among rural providers has grown into a national effort to position rural America as a place where new ideas in care delivery, technology, and policy can be tested and refined. The project gathers stories and perspectives from people working throughout the healthcare system, including clinicians, patients, policymakers, and developers, and uses those insights to build a shared vision for a more transparent and human-centered model of care.
Dr. Haynie shared with me his thoughts on how rural healthcare has the potential to lead the way in improving the entire system.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Daily Yonder: What was your journey to becoming a rural healthcare provider? How has practicing in a rural place shaped your understanding of medicine?
Dr. Holland Haynie: I didn’t set out with a master plan to become a rural physician. The path was more a series of doors that opened and mentors who nudged me toward work that felt meaningful. After training in pediatrics and then family medicine, I found myself pulled toward communities that reminded me of where I grew up, places where relationships matter, where people look you in the eye, and where medicine still feels personal.
Practicing in a rural setting has reshaped my understanding of medicine in ways I never anticipated. What you lose in proximity to resources, you gain in proximity to people. There’s no hiding behind roles or siloed departments. You’re the one who sees the newborn, manages the diabetic, stitches the farmer’s hand at 7 p.m., and hears the real story before the chart does. You learn quickly that continuity is not a luxury, it’s the entire operating system. Rural medicine has made me a better clinician, but more importantly, it’s made me a more grounded human being.
DY: You have referred to rural healthcare as a “test lab.” What does that look like in practice and how do you see rural communities functioning as incubators for healthcare innovation?
HH: “Test lab” can sound flashy, but in rural communities it means something very down-to-earth: we see the problems early, we feel the failures closer to the bone, and we can course-correct faster because the feedback loops are short and human.
In a rural clinic, you don’t have the bureaucratic distance that usually slows innovation. If a system doesn’t work, you know by Monday morning because the same patient you saw Thursday is back at your door. That intensity creates an environment where practical, grounded innovation thrives. We aren’t prototyping on whiteboards, we’re prototyping in the lived reality of families we know by name.
Rural communities are incubators because necessity forces focus. We don’t innovate for headlines. We innovate to survive, to keep care local, and to stretch scarce resources into something resembling dignity.
DY: What inspired you to start Rethinking Rural?
HH: Rethinking Rural grew out of a simple but uncomfortable truth: rural healthcare wasn’t failing because people didn’t care or weren’t working hard enough. It was failing because the underlying “railroad tracks” of how continuity, trust, and solvency are measured were never designed for rural communities in the first place.
I kept seeing patients fall through the gaps, not because the care wasn’t there, but because nothing in the system could verify or value the quiet, everyday continuity that holds rural care together. It felt like watching incredible people do heroic work on a broken bridge.
The inspiration was less a lightning bolt and more a slow accumulation of stories, frustrations, and moments of clarity. Eventually it became obvious: if we wanted better outcomes, we needed a new foundation, one that treated rural continuity and rural ingenuity as assets rather than afterthoughts.
DY: What impact do you hope Rethinking Rural will have on technology development, policy, and delivery of care?
HH: My hope is that Rethinking Rural reframes rural communities as the proving ground for what healthcare can become, not the place technology is adapted after it “works in the city,” but the place where new models are shaped first.
On the technology side, we want to build systems that start with verified human events and real continuity rather than abstract data exhaust. On the policy side, we hope to give lawmakers something they rarely get: economic-grade evidence of what works in real communities. And on the delivery side, we want to strengthen the connective tissue – the relationships, handoffs, and moments of trust – that make care feel whole to patients.
Ultimately, we want rural America to stop being the footnote and start being the blueprint.
DY: How do the cultural strengths of rural communities – trust, adaptability, resourcefulness, close relationships – create conditions that support experimentation in healthcare?
HH: Those strengths are the experiment. Rural communities operate with a kind of built-in resilience that you can’t manufacture. If you want to test new approaches to care, you need environments where people actually know one another, where reputation is a form of accountability, and where adaptation is instinctive.
Trust shortens the adoption curve. Resourcefulness removes the “we can’t do that here” mindset. Close relationships ensure that experimentation happens with, not to, the community. In a rural town, if you try something new, you’ll hear about it the next day at the grocery store. That level of transparency is an incredible asset.
These cultural strengths aren’t soft factors, they’re infrastructure.
DY: Many stories about rural healthcare lean toward challenges instead of potential. When you frame rural communities as central rather than peripheral, what shifts have you noticed in how people engage or collaborate?
HH: When rural communities are framed as peripheral, the conversation always starts with deficits, what’s missing, what’s broken, what’s too hard. But when you treat rural communities as central, people show up differently. They lean in with curiosity instead of caution. They stop asking, “How do we fix rural?” and start asking, “What can we learn from rural?”
I’ve seen policymakers, technologists, and investors become more open, more imaginative, and frankly more humble when they realize rural isn’t the margin – it’s the frontier. And locally, rural clinicians feel seen. They feel valued. That alone shifts the entire energy of collaboration.
Potential grows in any place where people stop apologizing for who they are.
I’m a practicing rural physician who still sees patients every day. The work of Rethinking Rural isn’t a think-tank exercise, it comes from the lived experience of watching what continuity makes possible when we value it, and what we lose when we don’t.
Rural communities have always punched above their weight. My hope is that we finally build systems that recognize that strength and give rural America the tools to lead, not lag.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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The post Q&A: Dr. Holland Haynie on Rethinking Rural appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
