When the Department of Health & Human Services rolled out its Beacon Community Program, it spoke in terms of supporting those healthcare communities that were leading the way in the move to implement new health IT.

Some recent news should remind policymakers that while it’s easy to focus on big providers making big investments, those stakeholders are not the only ones moving ahead when it comes to implementing new health IT.

According to this report, “Four small, rural, government-run Texas hospitals have banded together to create a unique rural regional health information network (RHIO) they say will enable clinicians to share patient information as well as the financial burden of an electronic health record (EHR).”

Perhaps the key point of interest in the stories is the size of the four hospitals. One “has 20 in-patient beds and sees between 1500 and 2000 patients a year in its emergency room,” while the others have 45, 25, and 14 beds respectively. They are also “located within 25 miles of each other in central Texas and frequently see the same patients.”

As Nathan Tudor, CEO of the 20-bed Stonewall Memorial Hospital, puts it, “None of us could do this project alone—it just wouldn’t be possible.”

He goes on to explain, “Because we’re so small, not every hospital can be everything to every patient, and so we were willing to collaborate and cooperate on this project. As a result we have overcome some of the financial and technology obstacles that have historically stood in the way of rural hospitals that want to implement EHRs.”

Developments like this remind us of the questions we had back when the Beacon Community Program was first unveiled. The Executive Summary of the Funding Opportunity Announcement states, “Selected communities must already be national leaders in the advancement of health IT, workflow redesign and care coordination, or quality monitoring and feedback.”

The question is, what’s a “national leader”? After all, it’s no secret that small, usually rural healthcare providers are the ones struggling the most to move forward on implementing HIT.

So if these providers in central Texas have figured out how to step ahead via collaboration, isn’t that worthy of being highlighted so that other, similarly situated stakeholders can learn from it?

There is no shortage of places in which federal policymakers can justifiably invest public resources. The trick is to make sure that larger providers are not the only ones being called “leaders.”

Jeff Rowe blogs daily at Priming the Pump.