CMS announces $193.7 million in rural health program awards to 45 Florida organizations

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced Oct. 23 that 45 organizations in Florida are receiving $193.7 million from the federal Rural Health Transformation Program.¹ The agency said the awards involve more than 500 partnerships among hospitals, clinics, local governments and community groups, and that the announcement is “one part” of the larger amount Florida was awarded for fiscal year 2026.¹

The release lists the kinds of services the money is meant to support: telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, services offered through pharmacies, diagnostic kiosks and community paramedicine. It does not name the 45 organizations or give individual amounts.¹

What Florida was allotted

The program will distribute $50 billion to states over five years. CMS said Dec. 29, 2025, that half of the money is split equally among approved states and half is allocated based on other factors. The agency’s state table lists Florida’s fiscal 2026 award as $209,938,195.²

The state’s list of awardees

Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office announced Aug. 11 “nearly $188 million” in awards under the program, which it said the Agency for Health Care Administration administers. The release described more than 80 awards serving communities in 31 rural counties and said Florida received $209 million through the federal-state initiative.³

The governor’s release broke the awards down by region:³

• Northwest Region: 35 awardees, $81 million
• Northeast Region: 14 awardees, $51 million
• Southwest Region: 21 awardees, $45 million
• Southeast Region: 11 awardees, $12 million

A three-page list attached to that release, titled “Year 1 Awardees,” shows 81 awards. Some organizations appear more than once, under different categories or regions. The two largest entries both go to CommunityHealth IT: $18,512,061.76 in the Northeast Region and $13,352,055.07 in the Southwest Region. The list has no county column.⁴

Neither the federal nor the state release says whether the Oct. 23 figure covers the same awards as the August list.¹³

What officials said

The CMS release included statements from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, DeSantis, U.S. Sens. Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, and 15 members of Florida’s U.S. House delegation.¹ U.S. Rep. Jimmy Patronis said in the release that “$81 million” of the investment “is going to Northwest Florida.”¹

The Florida Phoenix, in a story by Christine Sexton that WLRN published Oct. 27, reported that the grant is more than $5 million above what the DeSantis administration had previously said it was requesting.⁵

What the records do not show

• The names, amounts and counties of the 45 organizations in the Oct. 23 federal announcement.
• Whether the $193.7 million is the same money as the “nearly $188 million” the governor’s office announced in August, or how the two figures relate.
• Which 31 counties the governor’s office counted, or a county for each award on its list.
• How Patronis arrived at the $81 million figure; the governor’s release lists the same amount for the Northwest Region, but neither record links the two.