Preparing leaders in rural medicine
Rural healthcare remains one of the most underserved areas in medicine, with significant unmet needs in access, staffing, and specialized care. As populations age, skilled doctors, nurses, dentists and more are needed. Professionals who can integrate mental health support into doctor’s offices and emergency rooms ensure better health for rural communities.
Wilderness Health is stepping in to help prepare the professionals of tomorrow. This includes working with students through a collaboration with the University of Minnesota Interprofessional Internship Program.
University of Minnesota medical student Morghan Byrnes and dentistry student Seun Oginni, DDS '26 worked with Wilderness to analyze how behavioral health and medical care can work together. Byrnes and Oginni conducted interviews with health care leaders and frontline teams across northeastern Minnesota and northwestern Wisconsin. The duo also analyzed several years of integrated behavioral health data from surveys completed by Wilderness member facilities. They paired their own expertise with findings from literature reviews to provide recommendations for rural healthcare leaders. They found that the barriers to providing the best care can be managed through communication, collaboration, continuing education, and commitment.
The team completed their work during the 2024-2025 academic year and presented their findings to Wilderness member hospital leaders in May. They shared that “The project has expanded our perspectives beyond clinical care, helping us see how system-level decisions and organizational culture shape patient outcomes.”
As a result of their work, Wilderness member hospitals and clinics have new insights and new strategies for addressing mental health, behavioral health, and medical care as an integrated process. Executive Director Cassandra Beardsley notes that “The work completed by Morghan and Sean has been insightful. Their research into improving integrated behavioral health resulted in concrete deliverables—tools and insights that we can now use to guide future initiatives and improve patient care. Their contributions reflect the power of academic-community partnerships in addressing real-world health disparities."
About Wilderness Health- a non-profit collaborative of independent providers working together to improve rural health care in Northeastern Minnesota and Wisconsin. Headquartered in Two Harbors since 2013, Wilderness Health aims to create a unified and supportive network for its members through its core values of collaboration, independence, networking, and quality. For more information about Wilderness, visit https://wildernesshealthmn.org/.
This release was written by Zori Bloom, program director at Wilderness Health.