AMSA DRHC — Digital Rural Health Corps An AMSA program
AMSA Rural Health

All 50 states just funded rural health technology. Millions of patients still can't use it.

The Digital Rural Health Corps trains medical students to sit down beside those patients, work through the barriers with them in person, and document what they find. The result is a growing body of evidence on where digital access breaks down, and a generation of physicians who have seen it firsthand.

Fund or host DRHC → Join as a student navigator
300+ Students trained
19 Community deployments
2 States live
Ohio and Georgia
IRB Approved research protocol
Federal RHTP-funded
via Georgia AHEC
What DRHC does

Train. Deploy. Learn.

01

Train the students

Medical and pre-medical students are trained as Digital Health Navigators, then certified to train others in the communities they serve.

02

Deploy into existing infrastructure

Navigators plug into the AHEC network, health system, state agency, or academic partner a community already has. Nothing new to stand up.

03

Learn what the barriers actually are

Deployments run under an IRB-approved protocol using validated instruments. What navigators find goes back to partners, and into a growing body of research on rural digital access.

DRHC Fellow Jasrina Kaushal sitting at a table with an elderly community member during an Ohio deployment.
DRHC Fellow, Jasrina Kaushal, on an Ohio community center deployment.
See how the program works →
Who stands behind it
AMSA, student-led since 1950 KeyBank Foundation Georgia AHEC IRB-approved protocol NRHA 2026

DRHC began in December 2023 with a $100,000 KeyBank Foundation award to pilot in five Ohio counties. It is now live in two states, embedded in a funded federal grant, and led by a national fellow. See the full timeline →

States are looking for partners. All 50 hold first-year awards under the federal Rural Health Transformation Program, and the plans they wrote fund tools that assume a patient who can already navigate them. What states are asking for →
Two ways in

DRHC works two sides of the same gap at once. Pick the one that describes you.

I want to serve

Deploy where rural patients are.

Medical and pre-medical students join as Digital Health Navigators, train community trainers, and see rural care from the patient's side. Research shows that experience makes students more likely to practice rural medicine.

Join as a navigator → I want to fund or host this

Put a working model to work.

State agencies, AHECs, health systems, academic partners, foundations, and corporate funders back a program that is already deployed, already measured, and ready to scale into the next state.

See the partnership paths →