Public or private outpatient health care facility located where there is a shortage of health services and staffed by a nurse practitioner, physician assistant, or certified nurse midwife under the direction of a physician. It gives routine diagnostic services, laboratory services, drugs, and biologicals. It has access to other diagnostic services from facilities that meet federal guidelines and must be licensed by the state. Also called rural health center (RHC) .

Legislation enacted by Congress in 1977 and implemented in 1978 to increase access to primary health care services for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries living in rural areas. The RHCA also created a cost-based payment mechanism to ensure the financial viability of rural health clinics and encouraged the use of midlevel practitioners by providing payment for their services, even in the absence of a full-time physician.

Limited-service rural hospitals that provide outpatient and short-term inpatient hospital care on an urgent or emergency basis, then release patients or transfer them to an Essential Access Community Hospital (EACH) or other full-service hospital. To be designated as RPCHs, hospitals have to meet certain criteria including requirements that they not have more than six inpatient beds for acute (hospital-level) care and maintain an average inpatient length of stay of no more than 72 hours.