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ExpectMore.govExpectMore.gov home pageEXPECT FEDERAL PROGRAMS TO PERFORM WELL, AND BETTER EVERY YEAR.
Program Assessment

Program

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National Health Service Corps

The National Health Service Corps provides scholarships and loan repayment awards to doctors and other health providers in exchange for a commitment to provide health care to people living in areas with a shortage of health providers regardless of their ability to pay.

Rating

What This Rating Means

PERFORMING
Moderately Effective

In general, a program rated Moderately Effective has set ambitious goals and is well-managed. Moderately Effective programs likely need to improve their efficiency or address other problems in the programs' design or management in order to achieve better results.
  • The program purpose is clear and the program is designed to have a unique and significant impact. By placing doctors and other clinicians in areas with a shortage of health providers, the Corps can help patients who were previously without access to physicians or other types of clinicians and who may also have been unable to afford the cost of care.
  • The program ensures clinicians honor their service agreements and uses performance information to improve outcomes. The program has shown some efficiency improvements by shifting resources from administrative staff to pay for more doctors and other clinicians. Greater flexibility in allocation of funds between scholarships and loans could further improve efficiency.
  • The program lacks outcome information for newly adopted measures and will need to set ambitious targets once actual performance data are available. External evaluations indicate the program is effective at increasing health care access. For example, roughly half of program providers remain in service for a long period after the end of the federal service contract.

Improvement Plan

About Improvement Plans

We are taking the following actions to improve the performance of the program:

  • Developing an information system to replace BHCDANET (legacy system) to better manage data on scholars, loan repayers, and service sites.

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