 The University of Kentucky Center of Excellence in Rural Health hosted its annual Appalachian Research Day Conference in Paintsville today, sharing results of health research conducted with communities in Appalachia. Today we are here to sit on the porch as a community. I think it is so important that we have learned from our students and from the other people that are participating today how we can come together as a community to solve problems. This was kind of a dream of mine to bring researchers back to the community. They come in and do their research most of the time. They get the information that they want. They write their paper and then they leave. This gives us an opportunity to bring researchers back to sit on the porch, tell us what their findings are and work with the community on what solutions need to happen since the problem in the community can be solved in the community. Outpatient medication assisted treatment for addiction, adult and youth behavioral counseling and now psychiatric services accepting Medicare and all major insurance. Recovery is hard. Regret is harder. Appalachian Community Care, LLC in Pikeville and Weizberg, call 606-432-5660, find us on Facebook. Studies show Appalachia has higher mortality rates compared to the nation in seven of America's leading causes of death and has less access to healthcare facilities and professionals. If you live in rural, you may be an hour away before you can actually get to immediate care that you need. And so the death rate is higher in rural Kentucky than it is in the urban areas because of the access to care. One of the things that the center works on is to try to have that workforce there to take care of people in the field that need our care. So we're multifaceted there. We're the state office of rural health that brings a lot of value to our clinics, our hospitals to bring resources into them to help with technical assistance and those other things. We're trying to tell the story about what is going on in rural through our bridge magazine that we want to have examples of what works here so you don't have to reinvent the wheel there that we can build upon each other's success. Reporting for Mountain Top News, I'm Brianna Robinson.