Kittson Healthcare 1 of 8 hospitals chosen for national program

By Anna Jauhola
A last-minute application to a program aimed at small facilities has landed Kittson Healthcare as the first Minnesota hospital taking part in the Rural Hospital Stabilization Program.
After providing extra information, more details and an interview, CEO Andrea Swenson got word of their official acceptance in January. The program is offered through the National Rural Health Resource Center and is based on three goals – improving financial and operational performance, expanding existing services and developing new service lines, and engaging the community and marketing hospital services.
“Once we had our initial kickoff meeting, we started to find out there were 117 applications total,” Swenson said. “And it’s open to the United States. So they picked hospitals all over and they’re spread out throughout the country.”
Kittson Healthcare is joining the second cohort of this program with seven other hospitals, so they will have the chance to visit with other hospital officials from the first cohort as well.
The funding provided through this program pays for a community champion, someone to attend meetings with the cohort and work with the hospital through the program.
“When we learned about what that role entailed, because of that initial meeting with my leadership team, I think everybody thought of Cindy Urbaniak immediately,” Swenson said.
Urbaniak accepted and attended a “bootcamp” earlier this spring in Memphis, Tenn. Although Urbaniak already has much of the knowledge from the bootcamp with her years of experience in the healthcare field, she still learned a lot and is excited to make the program a success. Her main role will be to stay connected with the community, as her title suggests, and communicate their needs and wants back to Kittson Healthcare. This position is fully funded through the program, and it’s a 20-hour per week position.
“This is stuff I did with public health forever,” Urbaniak said. “I had 40 years of doing a lot of that – educating the public, meeting with people. Public health does a community needs assessment and the hospital does one too. So it was all things familiar to me.”
Urbaniak is currently awaiting the results of data collection on the Resource Center’s end before she can create material to present to the public.

To read the whole story, see the April 22, 2026, edition of the Kittson County Enterprise