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Joanie Perkins serves as the Chief Compliance Officer at North Sunflower Medical Center, a critical access hospital in Ruleville, Mississippi. Her love for medicine stemmed from her mother, who worked as an emergency room registered nurse in Dayton, Ohio, and would come home and tell her children stories about what had transpired throughout her day. This sparked a love of medicine in Joanie and her 10 brothers and sisters, about half of which went into medicine themselves.

“Once I learned about the special nuances of rural healthcare and how important it was, especially across the heartland in the Midwest, I was hooked.”

Joanie has focused on rural health for the past 20 years, specializing in rural health clinics and critical access hospitals, and she has worked in healthcare management for 37 years. She formed J.P. Consulting in 1987, an organization specializing in outpatient billing and clinic start-ups. As the need for rural consulting grew, Joanie divided the business off, and now acts as the principal consultant for J.P. Consulting, working with clinics and critical access hospitals nationwide.

Joanie serves rural areas by participating in the National Rural Health Association (NRHA) Congress, the primary care Health Resources and Service Administration (HRSA) committee and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) rural focus committee.

She has presented as a rural expert on multiple subjects at the NRHA, the National Rural Health Clinic Association, the New England Rural Roundtable Conference and several state rural associations. She is a past board member and president of the Mississippi Rural Health Association, and has enjoyed facilitating a series of workshops for rural health clinics across the state of Mississippi.