Olney Hospital Honored, Featured in Statewide News
Olney Hamilton Hospital found itself in the spotlight twice this week — once for its excellence, and once for the systemic challenges threatening rural health care across Texas.
The hospital first announced it had earned three 2025 Performance Leadership Awards from The Chartis Center for Rural Health during National Rural Health Day. Days later, it became the focus of a sweeping Texas Tribune investigation into the collapse of rural maternity care and the state’s chronically low hospital funding.
Together, the two stories paint a vivid picture of a hospital performing at the top of its class while simultaneously battling the financial pressures reshaping rural medicine statewide.
Top National Honors
Olney Hamilton Hospital CEO Michael Huff reported that OHH received Performance Leadership Awards in Quality, Outcomes, and Patient Perspectives, placing it in the top quartile - within the top 75 percent to 100 percent - of rural hospitals nationwide. The awards are based on the Chartis Rural Hospital Performance Index, a widely used framework for evaluating rural hospital performance.
“Our staff here at OHH received a CLEAN SWEEP this year,” Mr. Huff wrote, crediting the hospital’s employees, administration, and board for the achievement.
Chartis praised honorees for setting a “standard of excellence” in rural health. OHH’s recognition underscores its commitment to high-quality care, strong patient outcomes, and positive patient experiences — all critical benchmarks for hospitals operating in remote regions.
Just as OHH celebrated its awards, it became the central example in a Texas Tribune report about the statewide collapse of rural maternity care. The story detailed how OHH’s board struggled against financial pressures, falling revenues, and restrictive state and federal regulations to keep delivering babies at the new hospital, now under construction. The board ultimately voted earlier this year to stop delivering babies for the first time in more than a century of operation. Deliveries ended June 1.
OHH joins nearly 60 percent of rural Texas hospitals that no longer deliver babies. State lawmakers voted during the 2025 legislative session to shore up maternity services at rural hospitals, but that funding may arrive too late for OHH to take advantage of it.
OHH continues expanding other women’s health services and designed the new hospital building to allow a second operating room to be added if funding ever becomes available to restore obstetrics.