 At Pikeville Medical Center, we provide full service cancer treatment and follow-up care. And our loss in cancer center is one of only a few in Kentucky to hold accreditation from the Commission on Cancer with accommodations. Our purpose is saving lives. The Kentucky Hospital Association, Pikeville Medical Center and Appalachian Regional Health Care came together Tuesday, November 29th to host Talking to Kentucky. The event gave leaders in the organizations a chance to talk about growth, policy updates and hear concerns impacting the local community. It's really important to get a local flavor of how things are impacting different parts of the state. And one thing that I'm going to talk a little bit about is a big initiative that we worked on earlier this year and actually Pikeville and ARH were very, very big players in that and that was improving the patient transport system. And that really grew out of problems that we started hearing about that arose in eastern Kentucky. In addition to improved patient transportation, the Kentucky Hospital Association is working towards better reimbursements for local hospitals from Medicare and Medicaid. Well, it's really important, especially in rural communities, because so many patients are covered by government insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid. And so one of the policy initiatives is to make sure the hospitals are adequately reimbursed by those programs. And that's one of the things that we're going to be working on and it's important because you need strong hospitals to provide quality health care. And so reimbursement is key to that. The KHA plans to continue to work closely with local hospitals throughout Kentucky to not only improve patient care, but build strong hospitals that can provide access to high quality health care in rural areas. For Mountain Top News, I'm Brianna Robinson.