Rural providers that feel like Medicare isn't doing enough to help cope with difficulties specific to those areas have some encouraging news. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has launched its "first Rural Health Strategy intended to provide a proactive approach on healthcare issues to ensure that the nearly one in five individuals who live in rural America have access to high quality, affordable healthcare," the agency says in a release. "For the first time, CMS is organizing and focusing our efforts to apply a rural lens to the vision and work of the agency," CMS Administrator Seema Verma says in a release. The strategy's goals include improving access to care "through provider engagement and support" and advancing telehealth and telemedicine, CMS says. More information is online at http://go.cms.gov/ruralhealth.